Language Lore

Regular readers of  this blog will have realized, at least subcutaneously, that the author has a prescriptivist bias and does not shrink from proscribing certain contemporary usage as incorrect when it violates the traditional norm. This bias still rubs almost all professional linguists the wrong way, owing to the fact that in their hearts there lurks the old behaviorist antipathy to prescribing––as against faithfully describing––whatever usage is extant. In post-war American behaviorist linguistic circles, the idea that language usage should be viewed through the prism of correctness was rejected as unscientific, an attitude epitomized by the Romanist Robert A. Hall Jr.’s 1950 book, Leave Your Language Alone!

But the social science approach to language norms, no matter how it is couched or what terminology it recognizes, ultimately comes a cropper when confronted with the undeniable presence of the criterion of correctness in every language user’s Sprachgefühl, or what a prominent contemporary theoretician of historical linguistics (nomina sunt odiosa) calls “metagrammar.” This includes the knowledge every speaker possesses of what constitutes infractions of the linguistic norm, whether or not a given language has a codified standard. This metagrammatical superstructure, as it concerns correctness, is necessarily present in every act of language use––most often in the null mode–-irrespective of school learning or modern-day usage manuals.

A useful illustrative comparison is with music. When my father taught me as a child the rudiments of chorale writing, he instructed me inter alia to “avoid parallel fifths.” Writing such sequences was simply an error. It violated the norms of chorale writing as codified in books on harmony and composition. This was not a matter of scalar values, deontic logic, or “norms of appropriateness.” Even less so was it dependent on taste or preferential behavior.

To continue in the same vein, a cellist who plays a wrong note in a Bach suite cannot justify it by appealing to creative freedom: the note is either right or wrong, either what Bach wrote or not what Bach wrote. No interpretation of Bach licenses wrong notes. Any minimally musically-literate listener would know when the cellist played a B flat instead of a B natural.

Returning to language, naturally, attitudes toward norms and correctness vary in strength across the speech community depending on speakers’ education and personal preferences. Contemporary dictionaries like The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (AHD) routinely reflect this spectrum explicitly by citing the results of polling data from “Usage Panels.” For example, the verb err has a traditional pronunciation which is rapidly disappearing in American speech, as registered in AHD‘s report immediately following the entry:

“Usage Note: The pronunciation (ûr) for the word err is traditional, but the pronunciation (er) has gained ground in recent years, perhaps owing to influence from errant and error, and must now be regarded as an acceptable variant. The Usage Panel was split on the matter: 56 percent preferred (ûr), 34 percent preferred (er), and 10 percent accepted both pronunciations.”

When my gym trainer (a native speaker of American English in his thirties) pronounces err in the common phrase “to err on the side of caution” to rhyme with air, I immediately register it as incorrect, a violation of the (traditional) norm, even though I know full well that the pronunciation is not idiosyncratic. His phonetic trait does not lower him in my estimation of him as a trainer, but for better or worse it does automatically align him with those who are ignorant of (or knowingly ignore) the norm that characterizes my own speech.

MICHAEL SHAPIRO

The contemporary response to a request, not a problem or no problem, has spread from American English to all of the European languages, e. g., German kein Problem, French pas de problème(s), (Serbo-)Croatian nema problema, Bulgarian няма проблем, Russian нет проблем, etc. Note, however, that the word “problem” is calqued in the plural rather than the source language’s singular.

As they say in Russian, Спрашивается ‘[literally] one asks’, or Why? More to the point, why do people habitually resort to  this mindless formula? Apropos, here’s a bit of text from an exchange between a customer and a waitress (native speaker of American English, ca. 25 years old):

Waitress: “Would you like to see a dessert list?”
Customer: “Actually, I’d just like a double decaf espresso.”
Waitress: “Not a problem.”

Now, such a quotidian exchange might need no interpretation, being utterly straightforward. But the question arises nonetheless, why the waitress didn’t just say “Certainly, sir,” or “Of course,” or “Right away.” Why just “Not a problem?”

A literalist approach might make one surmise that the waitress actually wanted to convey the idea that, whereas some restaurants had no espresso machine, hers did, hence making a demitasse of double decaf espresso would not constitute a problem. But this would be tantamount to clobbering linguistic gnats with a psychological trebuchet. Her réplique was, after all, just a mindlessly spontaneous resort to a token of language use tout court, a cliché and nothing more. But this description is too facile, for the following reason.

Every utterance involves a choice by the speaking self from among a repertoire of contextually equipossible variant words or expressions signifying the same general meaning, and the range of possibility includes inventories of clichés as well. The waitress made a choice, which means that she privileged an expression token involving the word problem rather than the alternatives. The upshot is the involvement of an IMPLICIT HIERARCHY, where rank relations among possible variants always imply the presence of VALUE STYLE as a necessary frame for all uses of language, no matter how humble or mundane.

MICHAEL SHAPIRO

[Addendum: Patrick Honan points out (viva voce) that “no problem” is commonly used nowadays instead of “you’re welcome” as a retort to “Thanks.” One could, of course, construe this usage as a shorthand for “Whatever you’re thanking me for was not a problem (for me).”]

While alliteration has a very old pedigree in English and is the source of innovation in phraseology (despite blatant redundancies, cf. the odious binomials skill set and price point, to name only two contemporary cases), paronomasia has been neglected as a source of false analogy that gives rise to variant pronunciations. The American English rendering of the word machination(s) with the sound [ʃ] instead of [k] for –ch-, while manifestly produced by analogy with machine, should probably not be attributed solely to the influence of the latter, as will be made clear below.

The Oxford English Dictionary Online has the following entry for this word:

“machination, n. An instance of plotting or (usually malicious) contrivance; an intrigue, plot, or scheme. Now usu. in pl.
Pronunciation: Brit. /ˌmakᵻˈneɪʃn/, /ˌmaʃᵻˈneɪʃn/, U.S. /ˌmækəˈneɪʃən/, /ˌmæʃəˈneɪʃən/. Etymology:  < Anglo-Norman and Middle French machination plotting, wicked contrivance or stratagem (13th cent. in Old French) and its etymon classical Latin māchinātiōn-, māchinātiō machine-making, piece of machinery, stratagem (rare in this sense in classical Latin, although attested in post-classical Latin in British sources from 960) < māchināt-, past participial stem of māchinārī + -iō. Compare Italian macchinazione plot, machine, siege engine (14th cent.), Catalan maquinació plot (late 14th cent.). The pronunciation with /ʃ/, due to the influence of machine n., was recorded in Webster (1961); the presence of an entry in the B.B.C.’s Recommendations for Pronouncing Difficult Words (S.P.E. Tract No. XXXII, 1931), p. 28, recommending the traditional pronunciation, may be indirect earlier evidence for the existence of the pronunciation with /ʃ/.”

Besides the influence of machine, one should also consider the same sort of paronomastic interference that has produced a derived meaning, in American English, for the verb meld, namely ‘mixing together’, even though the original meaning was ‘announce’ and had nothing to do with ‘mixing’. The new meaning is the product of conflating meld with weld, i. e., where only the initial consonant need be interchanged for the new sense to ensue. In the case of machination(s), the false analogy stems from the sound-alikes mesh (cf. enmesh) and (much less-likely) mash. The original sound of the Anglo-Norman word is undercut by its etymologically inauthentic association with a verb that suggests something like what takes place in and results from a plot, intrigue, or malicious contrivance.

MICHAEL SHAPIRO

Aside from the suffixes for plural number and possessive case in substantives, the English dental fricatives s and z are not in regular alternation in native words, the exception being a rare singleton, goose [gu:s] ~ gosling [gózli?], where an s in medial position before the liquid l is pronounced as its lax counterpart z. This position of neutralization encompasses loan words with medial s before r as well, e.g., Israel [ízr?èl].

What is being neutralized here is the distinction between tense and lax obstruents, and the predictable outcome is the unmarked (lax) member of the opposition, namely z. Note that this suspension of distinctiveness applies to non-medial clusters of dental fricative + liquid as well––but with reversed values. Thus in the far more frequent case of s + l in initial position, only the marked s is possible, as in slip, slide, etc. This reversal occurs in marked contexts, which individuates initial position vis-à-vis other positions.

The medial [s] as a variant instead of [z] in the name for the capital of Norway is a spelling pronunciation evidently supported by its foreign provenience, hence exhibiting no alternation between s and z (as in goose ~ gosling). But note withal the sole normative pronunciation of the Norwegian borrowing quisling with a [z], i. e., in conformity with native English phonetics.

MICHAEL SHAPIRO

Rection is the older term for grammatical government, as in what postposition a word takes. In the anglophone world, Americans are particularly  prone to making mistakes in this sphere of grammar. For instance, a common error is replacing of with to after the verb ask. This is due to interference between two semantically similar cases involving the same action, viz. “putting a question to” and “asking a question of” someone. The result is a contamination, leading to the oft-heard but unequivocally erroneous *asking a question to, particularly in the language of the media .

Similarly, the postpositions of and for are frequently interchanged erroneously. One is “desirous of” a change but “prepared for” it, just as one “consents to” a strategy but “acquiesces in” it, although the latter verb formerly allowed both to and with as complements, which are now obsolescent.

It is just such grammatical nuances of rection that most often trip up non-native speakers who are otherwise fluent in English.

MICHAEL SHAPIRO

Listening to the radio this afternoon and hearing my namesake, Jeff Schapiro (never mind the German variant orthography) of the Richmond Times-Dispatch, expatiating on the vagaries of Virginia politics, I was reminded yet again of the seeming perfusion in America of the surname that derives from that of the Jewish residents of the medieval German city of Speyer who eventually migrated to Eastern Europe, including Lithuania. In fact (according to my father, whose ancestors came from Radoshkovichi in what is now called Belarus), there were so many Shapiros in Vil’na (the Russianized name of the capital, Vilnius) during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that some of them changed their name to Vilenkin, a Yiddish-Russian hybrid deriving from their patrial.

Not all Shapiros are created equal. When in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries Jews immigrated to America from the Pale of Settlement in their thousands, many of them arrived at Ellis Island in New York bearing unpronounceable Polish, Ukrainian, Byelorussian, and Bessarabian names. This apparently didn’t sit well with immigration officials, so in order to simplify matters, they frequently assigned the name Shapiro ex parte to these onomastically-impaired newcomers, Cohen and Levy not being suitable because of tribal restrictions.

As they used to say in the Soviet Union before it krepiered, Dva mira––dva Shapiro (“Два мира––два Шапиро” [rhymes in Russian]) ‘Two worlds––two Shapiros’.

MICHAEL SHAPIRO

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GLOSSARY
ex parte: from or on one side only, with the other side absent or unrepresented (Latin)
krepier, v.: to die (Yiddish)
onomastic, adj.: of, relating to, or explaining a name or names
orthography, n.: (correct) spelling
perfusion, n.: a great quantity
patrial, n.: the word for the name of a country or place and used to denote a native or              inhabitant of it
vagary, n.: an extravagant or erratic motion or action
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The long-standing mystery as to how the idiomatic phrase in American English, “I could care less,” could mean the same thing as its negation, “I couldn’t care less,” is to be explained as an ELLIPSIS. The full version underlying it is: “I could care (even) less, if I cared to (care).”

MICHAEL SHAPIRO

No one exposed to contemporary media language can have missed the gross overuse of the words ‘icon’ and ‘iconic’ in American English. The grotesque surfeit of their occurrence has now reached the point where the Los Angeles Times has reportedly banned them from its pages (along with legend and legendary as applied to persons).

How to explain their rise in ubiquity? The terminologization of icon in computer-speak could be a contributory factor, but a more proximate cause may lurk in something virtual, viz. the homophony of the initial vowel with the words I and eye. Nothing is more important to the notional content of the contemporary meanings of icon and iconic than their epitomic connotations of SELFHOOD (as embodied in the first person singular pronoun) and of SEEING (as embodied in name of the organ of sight). This explanation rises in plausibility when seen as a variation on Euclid’s pons asinorum as applied to language.

MICHAEL SHAPIRO

When it comes to mispronunciations of foreign phrases in American English, the French locution déjà vu takes the gâteau. This phrase’s popularity rose with the jocund twist it received in the winged variant, “It’s deja vu all over again,” excogitated by Yogi Berra, the erstwhile New York Yankee catcher with a penchant for malapropism.

Americans habitually garble the second word of this phrase, making it sound like the French word vous ‘you [pl.]’, despite the fact that a passable simulacrum of the French pronunciation is easily rendered by pronouncing it like English view (without the diphthongal offglide, of course).

One is yet again reminded here of the popular Japanese proverb, Ikken kyo ni hoete banken jitsu o tsutau (一犬嘘に吠えて万犬実お伝う), which loosely translated means ‘One dog barks out a lie and ten thousand dogs take it up as the truth’ and must surely figure as a principle of cultural change, including language.

MICHAEL SHAPIRO

The common words temperature and February are often pronounced with vowel elision and/or dejotation, by which latter is meant here the elision of a liquid or glide following a consonant and preceding the medial vowel, resulting in phonetic variation, viz. [témpəchur] and [fébyueri], alongside the pronunciations that are guided by orthography. In the case of February the dropping of r after b does not alter the fact that the glide (transcribed by the letter y here) remains regardless of which variant is heard in contemporary (American) English.

Someone unfamiliar with the arcana of structural linguistics may wonder why such an elision takes place despite the orthography. The reason lies in the nature of the relation between speech sounds and their implementation. Every speech sound has a content that is manifested in actual utterances in such a way as to reveal––to both learner and user––just what that content is. In semiotic terms, this is to say that there is an iconic relation between the sounds and the rules of their implementation. The rules of a language’s phonology are a map of its distinctive features. In other words, the rules of combination of linguistic units (here: sounds) are a function of the units’ makeup.

In the case of the two words at issue, one needs also to realize that speech sounds do not occur in isolation but are grouped together in syllables, which are the basic gestalt domains of speech. A syllable is defined by three POSITIONS : the nucleus––usually a vowel––and two margins, namely the onset and the coda, which are resp. the initial and the final sounds in the syllable, preceding and following the vocalic nucleus. Taking a monosyllable like sprat as a handy example, the onset consists of spr- and the coda of t.

Returning to temperature and February, in each case there is an extant pronunciation that is at variance with the orthography whereby the liquid r in onset position following an obstruent (= true consonant) is elided before the vowel. The sound change that is constituted by this elision falls under the compass of a general process called DEJOTATION, defined as the dropping of a liquid or glide in onset position. The function of such changes is to produce an icon of the relation between UNIT and CONTEXT, here between sound and syllable. It is through processes of this kind that all languages remain true to their nature as structures (patterns) and are not merely agglomerations of facts. This is, indeed, the logic governing all linguistic variation.

MICHAEL SHAPIRO