All posts by Michael Shapiro

The Fading of Oral Tradition

June 14, 2011

The advent of the digital revolution is only the latest phase in the eclipse of the oral tradition in language use by practices derived from the sphere of the written word. Thus when a radio announcer mispronounces chicanery by rendering the stressed vowel so as to rhyme with can rather than cane, he is clearly relying on a habit of reading, not speaking, which produces American English [æ] instead of (British English) Anglicized [ā]. One can safely guess that he has never actually heard the word pronounced by a speaker who knows the correct form.

Never hearing some words of English lexis is clearly becoming the common experience of a growing number of speakers of American English. This is evidently what accounts for the establishment of incorrect stresses like cónsummate (the adjective, not the verb) among even educated speakers for what in the English oral tradition is consúmmate [kənˈsʌmət] (cf. the differential designations for the corresponding entry in the Cambridge English Pronouncing Dictionary, 16th ed.).

On an autobiographical note, it was in fact only when I first heard the word pronounced correctly from a paragon of English diction, my late wife Marianne (of blessed memory) that I changed my own prosodic habits to comport with those of someone who had evidently imbibed it herself from her early orthoepic models and, more importantly, embodied its meaning in her own person. Мир праху ее.

MICHAEL SHAPIRO

[Addendum, 2/27/12: On the BBC World Service today, one could hear a clip from an interview with Eileen Chamberlain Donahoe, U.S. Ambassador to the Human Rights Council, who mispronounced the word patently ‘obviously’ in the phrase “patently ridiculous,” which even in standard American English has a traditional stressed vowel in this meaning that conforms to the British (rhymes with latent) rather than the American norm for the word patent.]

Error, A Natural History

June 13, 2011

Only humans err (cf. St. Augustine: Errare humanum est > Alexander Pope: “To err is human, to forgive divine.”). If we attribute error to animals, it is because we are grounded by our habits of thought, our native penchant for the anthropomorphization and metaphorization of everything. When it comes to language, the least interesting domain within this sub-category of human behavior is what linguists call speech errors and are typically on about, namely slips of the tongue (lapsus linguae), Spoonerisms, and the whole panoply of performance errors that are easily correctible and, indeed, usually corrected on the spot (including so-called Freudian slips).

A mistake is an error or fault resulting from defective judgment, deficient knowledge, or carelessness. It is also a misconception or misunderstanding. The etymology is from Middle English mistaken ‘misunderstand’ < Old Norse mistaka ‘take in error’ < mis– ‘wrongly’ + taka ‘take’. Error is from Middle English errour < Old French < Latin error < errre ‘wander’. From the perspective of Latin, then, the ultimate meaning involves ‘wandering’, alias straying, deviating from the right path. Compare this ur-meaning to that found in the root of the Russian word for error, viz. oshibka, a deverbal noun: –shib– means ‘throw, hurl, sling’, and o– is a prefix with ‘mis-‘ as one of its senses, e. g., ogovorit’sia ‘make a speech error’ < o- + govori- ‘speak, say’. The modern verb for ‘err’ is oshibit’sia, which originarily must have been derived from something like ‘mis-‘ + ‘throwing’, i. e. ‘missing the mark’. In Japanese, to extend the comparative scope, the quotidian word for error is machigai, where the element ma means ‘space’ or ‘time’, and chigai is the deverbal nominal stem  (< chigau ‘differ’) meaning ‘difference, divergence’; hence error in Japanese is ultimately, as in Russian, something like ‘divergence from the right point/mark in space (or time)’.

The upshot––linguistic, moral, and pragmatistic––of this natural history of (the words for) error is support for Charles Sanders Peirce’s IDEA––also to be disinterred from the etymologies of the words right and wrong––that “men and words reciprocally educate each other; each increase of a man’s information involves and is involved by, a corresponding increase of a word’s information . . . My language is the sum total of myself.”

MICHAEL SHAPIRO

Professional Argots

June 11, 2011

Every language has social as well as regional dialects, and the social variety includes professional argots whose special features may resort to vocabulary that is different from or not to be found in standard lexis. A well-known example from the languages of Europe and Asia is thieves’ argot, i. e., the special jargon developed by criminals in order to conceal the meaning of their utterances or written messages from the public and, more particularly, the police.

This kind of linguistic specialization can affect any level of a language, including the phonological and the syntactic. For instance, in Russian the language of mariners places the stress in the word kompas ‘compass’ on the second syllable, whereas the normative stress is on the initial. American weather forecasters on the radio habitually violate the cooccurrence rules of English grammar when they couch their predictions in terms of “a chance for showers/rain/snow, etc.” (instead of the normative postposition of after chance). In a similar vein, radio interviewers have developed fatuous formulas when transacting business with their interviewees like “help me/us understand” and “thanks for joining us,” some of which are locutions not to be heard in ordinary speech. Whatever the practical considerations that conspire to condition such innovations, stylistically they are to be judged as rebarbative and totally avoidable.

MICHAEL SHAPIRO

Paroemics: The Linguistic Ecology of the Proverb

June 10, 2011

Every language has proverbs. English, Russian, and Japanese have not only the largest lexica but also the greatest number of proverbs, with the most comprehensive Japanese proverb dictionaries approaching a six-figure total. English in all its varieties differs from Russian and Japanese in the ecological prominence of proverbs in actual use, which is to say that speakers and writers of English no longer habitually recur to proverbs. When was the last time you uttered the words––or heard anyone else say–– A stitch in time saves nine?

By contrast, Russians and Japanese sprinkle their speech with proverbs at every turn. This paroemic predilection has nothing to do with the speaker’s class or education, nor with urban vs. agrarian social context. When a Russian resorts to the proverb na net i suda net––literally, ‘to a NO there’s no justice/court’––to express resignation before an insuperable impasse, they are employing a piece of paronomasia that conveys its meaning with a poetic punch not available to a purely discursive statement.

Beyond paronomasia, there is also the frequent special force of figuration conjured up in proverbs that is colligated  with their analogical imagery. When a Japanese says setchin-mushi mo tokorobiiki (雪隠虫も所贔屓) ‘even the dung beetle loves its own bailiwick’, a whole world far removed from contemporary mores comes to life that endows the utterance’s context with a particular purport. The linguistic ecology of modern-day English is all the poorer for having foregone the paroemic riches at its disposal.

MICHAEL SHAPIRO

Repetition

June 8, 2011

Variety may be the spice of life, but repetition is its foundation. Bilateral symmetry, biorhythms, cyclical bodily functions, night and day––everything involves repetition. When it comes to language, repetition may be stylistically benign or malign, with instances of the former lending themselves to rhetorical utility. Thus Hamlet’s “Words, words, words.” (Hamlet: Act 2, Scene 2, line 192) is a device that classical rhetoric classifies as epizeuxis or palilogia, defined as the repetition of a single word, with no other words in between, for emphasis or to convey vehemence.

There is also the kind of repetition in speech, such as stammering or the insertion of “you know” or “like” at every turn, that belongs to a generally harmless class of disfluencies, i. e., those that are, or border on, VERBAL TICS. When a person habitually and profusely interlards his utterances with phrases like “in other words,” “incidentally,” or “by the way,” a benign interpretation would grant speakers prone to them the use of these aimless interruptions of the speech flow as slot fillers or place markers they evidently need to fill out the diapason of discourse time while sorting out in their mind exactly what to say and in what order.

But the question nevertheless hangs in the air as to why such fillers are needed at all; why, indeed, a simple pause wouldn’t do. The easy answer is that many speakers value the phatic function over the referential: they wish, in other words, to keep their listeners/interlocutors rhetorically at bay, so to speak, by elongating their utterances and thereby gaining discourse time at the expense of their partners’. (In the last sentence I have used fillers of the sort being discussed advisedly.) In the final analysis, even this speech strategy can be seen as nothing more than a (puerile?) aggrandizement––possibly an unconscious one––of the utterer’s ego.

MICHAEL SHAPIRO

Epiphenomena of Language Use (Nonce Forms)

Language is like a sparkle machine, producing epiphenomena in use that are unattested in dictionaries or otherwise ungrounded in the norms of speech. One such case is the nonce locution in front of used instead of “before” or “to” in designating the number of minutes preceding the hour, which can be heard emanating from the mouth of the local host of the NPR program “Morning Edition” on WAMC-FM (Northeast Public Radio). There is, of course, no need for such an innovation, whatever its origin, and it can only arouse the ire and annoyance of a language purist, but it nevertheless indirectly reminds one of the issue of innovations in language change.

Language is full of examples of items that are unsanctioned by the speech community. Some of these are purely personal linguistic idiosyncrasies, including unusual pronunciations, morphological deviations, and syntactically ill-formed constructions. But some can also be innovations that have the capacity to be copied and to spread throughout the speech community. One of the tasks of historical linguists interested in the theory of change is explaining just this capacity.

MICHAEL SHAPIRO

The Connotative Content of Regional Accents

June 5, 2011

With the onslaught of mass media and the entrenchment of standard languages, regional accents are becoming an endangered species throughout the industrialized world. To be sure, these varieties continue to play a role in cementing solidarity among members of a (relatively) homogeneous speech community without necessarily excluding newcomers whose speech adheres without exception to the standard. From the perspective of an outsider looking in, moreover, regional accents can be seen to have a certain connotative content, one that arouses a kind of exogenous aesthetic admiration for the colorful, unadulterated, and authentic features of language in use. What is routinely taken unreflexively by the speaker of a regional dialect as nothing more than linguistic habit, in the service of purely utilitarian communicative goals, can alternately be perceived by the speaker of the standard as an aesthetic object.

Thus, episodic exposure to an authentic native pronunciation in a region (like rural Vermont) where the colorless standard otherwise reigns supreme can have the effect of causing a positive reevaluation of dialects for their (unintended) symbolic byproduct, viz. a heightened awareness of the historical persistence of linguistic mores that connote a subtle form of human solidarity.

MICHAEL SHAPIRO

What’s in a Name?

June 2, 2011

“What’s in a name? That which we call a rose/By any other name would smell as sweet.” (Romeo and Juliet [II, ii, 1-2]). When Juliet utters these words, little does she know how wrong she is, both in the play and generally. Every name has a particular semantic load, and its meaningfulness can be enhanced by its relative transparency, both as to constituent structure (if any) and its iconic potential. In the event, the beauty––here, the goodness of fit––is definitely in the ear of the beholder.

Languages and cultures differ quite widely in the latitude they countenance as to onomastic structure and use. With reference to fore- and surnames, there are cultures (like Indonesian) in which persons typically go by only one name (cf. some performers in Western cultures). If they regularly allot more than one name to their members, there may be a range of variability, such as middle names beside first and last names in Anglo-Saxon and Romance countries. Russian occupies a unique place with its de rigueur triplet of forename, patronymic (father’s name modified by a suffix), and surname, the latter two differing––within morphological limitations–– according to the sex of the bearer (e. g., the daughter of Mikhail Konstantinovich [Michael, son of Constantine] is always known as Avigeia Mikhajlovna [Abigail, daughter of Michael], regardless of a change in surname through marriage, etc.). Some cultures (like Hungarian and Japanese) impose a reverse order of given and family names compared to that of Western European ones, viz. last name preceding first name.

What is interesting in the American context is the huge variety of naming practices, owing to the fact of the multicultural population and the historical persistence of certain patterns inherited from bygone eras, such as giving the offspring the mother’s maiden name as a forename. The upshot is an impression that any combination is possible, but this is not strictly so. Jews, for instance, adhere traditionally to Biblical forenames preceding obviously Jewish surnames, although this custom is undergoing fragmentation so that one now encounters formerly unthinkable combinations like “Kevin Shapiro” or “Scott Goldberg.” And the Anglophone Chinese, particularly in Hong Kong, have, of course, long masked their proper given names with Christian ones.

Depending on knowledge and sensitivity to language, each speaker of American English will have a reaction to or evaluation of the particular combination of names borne by someone else in the culture, ranging from neutral to marked. The unusualness or rarity of a surname, for instance, may elicit questions as to its provenience.

Returning to the Shakespeare lines with which this post began, one should note that “Rose” is nowhere to be found among the hundred currently most popular girls’ given names, having been elbowed out by argosies of Tiffanys, Courtneys, Kimberlys et al. Tant pis!

MICHAEL SHAPIRO

Stylistics of the Alveolar Flap

The voiced consonant one hears in American English (among other varieties of English) between vowels post-tonically (= after the stress) in words like bitter and bidder is called an alveolar flap, a sound articulated with the tip of the tongue placed against the alveolar ridge and the vocal bands vibrating. This allophone (phonetic variant) of the phonemes /t/ and /d/, symbolized [ᴅ], is also heard after the post-vocalic nasal /n/, so that international is typically pronounced [-nᴅ-].

The identical intervocalic pronunciation of orthographic t and d can create an unintended comic effect when the words in question belong to two stylistically quite incompatible sectors of the lexicon. Thus, the recent frequency in the news of the Swiss name Blatter (the surname of the FIFA president, Sepp Blatter), which Americans understandably pronounce with an alveolar flap, makes the man sound like a component of human anatomy.

What has not been remarked elsewhere, however, is the stylistic restriction on such a neutralization of the difference between /t/ and /d/, namely in formal speech. But less-than-careful speakers, even radio announcers, do allow themselves to carry over their informal phonetic habits into formal diction, with noticeable effect. Thus the male radio voice one hears announcing the name of the organization, Public Radio International, after its programs habitually fails to articulate the appropriate formal variant [t]––i.e., the dental stop––in the third word, substituting the alveolar flap instead, which makes him sound less than sober.

MICHAEL SHAPIRO

Pauses between Words

May 28, 2011

If the face is the window of the soul (cf. L. vultus est index animi), then speech is the window of the mind. Pauses between words are also part of speech, and as such are to be reckoned as indices of mental states.

Pauses may be motivated by a number of performance factors, including indecision and habitual stammering. But nothing except some kind of deficiency explains pausing between “President” and “Komorowski,” as did President Barack Obama in his recorded remarks from Poland, broadcast over the radio today, addressing his Polish counterpart. Not only does this particular pause—i. e. between grammatically closely-bound words––signify a lack of fluency, it also betrays a lack of connection to the addressee and to the context on the utterer’s part.

The language of Mr. Obama’s public speaking, despite all the praise heaped on it by commentators for its putative rhetorical skill, is actually often less than fluent, which is to say that the words do not FLOW (L fluens, fluēnt-, present participle of fluere, ‘to flow’). When these commentators say—as did the one on the BBC World Service, whose words accompanied today’s clip—that Mr. Obama sounds “professorial,” the mind boggles (v. intrans.). Unnatural hesitation, pauses between words, elongated enunciation: are these the phonetic characteristics that make speech “professorial?” If this is an accurate judgment by the public, it can only reflect badly on the professoriate.

MICHAEL SHAPIRO