Language Lore

The radio interview with President Barack Obama broadcast today on the BBC World Service showed yet again that as a speaker of contemporary American English Mr. Obama has certain idiosyncrasies. For instance, when speaking of the Taliban (ṭālibān, meaning ‘students’ in Arabic), his pronunciation deviates from that of the overwhelming majority of speakers in having the sound [i:] after the [l] preceding the unstressed medial vowel, making it sound like the second vowel of tally rather than that of tulip. This unwonted pronunciation can occasionally be heard from certain American generals when interviewed by the media as well.

The source and impulse behind this idiosyncrasy is clearly speech, mostly by non-natives, that is perceived by some speakers of American English to be “authentic,” namely the pronunciation of the word in Arabic, where the [l] is unvelarized and fronted, creating the impression that in order to reproduce it in English “authentically” one needs to render it like the second vowel of tally. Needless to say, neither Mr. Obama nor the American generals whom he may have heard this pronunciation from in the first place are known to have any authentic knowledge of Arabic phonetics.

In Mr. Obama’s speech this attempt at phonetic verisimilitude in the pronunciation of a foreign item is of a piece with another of his speech traits (already detailed in an earlier post), namely rendering the word Pakistan with the first and last vowels mimicking Pakistani English [a:], as in father, instead of general American English [æ], as in cat.

It’s an interesting question, pertaining to the cultural determinants of language use, exactly why certain speakers persist in deviating idiosyncratically from the overwhelming evidence of the norm that they are exposed to. In the case of foreign borrowings, contrarian adherence to what they perceive to be “authentic” seems to be the answer. Perhaps they feel (at some undeterminable psychological level––quién sabe?) that this phonetic proclivity makes them seem more knowledgeable about the subject of the discourse in which their speech is embedded.

MICHAEL SHAPIRO

Occasionally––as regular readers of this blog will have noted––I allow myself a post tinctured by my own life experiences. What follows is in that vein.

Recently, while on a trip to Uppsala via Frankfurt on Lufthansa, I was exposed to the sounds of German, which recalled my own family milieu, where German was spoken from time to time by my parents, both of whom spoke it fluently from childhood and were educated in Germany (Berlin, Freiburg, Leipzig) in the 1920s. Just before embarking on this trip, I had thought for the umpteenth time about the line from Goethe’s poem «Grenzen der Menschheit» («Limits of Mankind»), which is this post’s title («What distinguishes gods from men?») and which I had memorized as a schoolboy in Hollywood during my first year of German study. This reminiscence was prompted also by the fact that I had just used the line as a motto to the poem by my father that I’d distributed to my students in the Philosophy of the Russian Novel course I taught this past semester at Green Mountain College in Poultney, Vermont, and had declaimed to them as a sample of Russian verse by a twentieth-century Russian poet––a poem composed, nota bene, while the author was on a train traveling from Indianapolis to Los Angeles. Here it is (in a very rough translation by the blogger):

Константин Шапиро (1896 -1992) Constantine Shapiro

Направо и налево горы,                         To the right and left are mountains,
Кругом лишь кактусы растут.               Only cactuses grow all around.
Колючие то дети флоры,                        These are prickly children of flora,
Среди них люди не живут.                    Among them people do not live.

Но кое–где видны жилища,                 But here and there dwellings are visible,
Вот мельница, и колесо                         There’s a mill, and a wheel
От ветра крутится, есть пища––         Turns from the wind, and there’s food––
Хоть достается не легко.                        Even though it’s not easy to get it.

Я видел даже три коровы;                       I even saw three cows;
Наверно есть тут и трава.                        There’s probably grass here too.
Кондуктор с ликом из Кордовы            The conductor with a mien from Cordova
Со мной беседовал слегка.                      Conversed with me a bit.

Я ночью спал довольно крепко,            I slept quite soundly through the night,
Хоть жестко было и теснò.                      Even though it was hard and crowded.
Сосед в Париже был и метко                  My neighbor had been in Paris and aptly
Описывал свое житье.                               Described his life.

Мне с острым клювом снилась птица     I dreamt of a bird with a sharp beak,
И вот ко мне летит уж вкось,                     And it’s already flying at me at an angle,
В руке моей вдруг вижу––спица:             Suddenly I see a knitting needle in my hand:
Ее прогнать мне удалось.                            I was able to chase it away.

Омлет в вагоне–ресторане                          I ate an omelet in the dining car
Я скушал, кофеем запил,                             And drank it down with coffee,
Потом, рассевшись на диване,                   Then, relaxing on the divan,
Судьбу свою благословил.                           I blessed my fate.

Блажен, кто может вдохновенье                 Blessed is he who can know inspiration
Познать душой и отдохнуть.                        In his soul and rest.
Ему грехов его забвенье                                The oblivion of his sins
В нирвану открывает путь.                           Opens a path for him to Nirvana.

Блажен, кого небесным звоном                   Blessed is he whom the Angel
Наполнил Ангел с юных лет,                        Has filled with the heavenly peal,
Кому в глаза, как пред амвоном,                 Before whose eyes, as before the ambo,
Сияет философский свет.                               Shines forth the light of philosophy.
1954                                                                         1954

MICHAEL SHAPIRO

The traditional designation of an autobiographical account as a literary genre has always gone by the name memoirs, in the plural, not the singular. Recently, however, writers and readers have begun referring to it exclusively in the singular, viz. memoir. This change can in part be accounted for by the fact that of all contemporary literary genres memoirs was the only one whose designation occurred in the plural only, the singular being reserved for other kinds of written account such as a memorandum, notice, special study, monograph, or history. The change, therefore, can be seen as a lexical normalization.

A possibly covert other reason for the change is the simple fact that speakers and writers––particularly of American English––are ignorant of the original meaning of the word, namely ‘remembrances’ or ‘memories’. The (French) form that took root in English to mean the genre obscures its origin and its attendant meaning, hence facilitating the new recurrence to the singular and the oblivion of the traditional plural.

MICHAEL SHAPIRO

In those languages of the world that are inflected, the plurals of nouns are routinely formed by adding a desinence (= inflectional suffix) to the stem of the singular. English is no exception. There is thus an iconic relation between the forms of the two grammatical numbers, viz. the plural is longer than the singular.

However, English also has a set of plurals which are shorter than their singular counterparts, namely the learnèd words of Latin and Greek origin such as medium, phenomenon, criterion, etc., whose plurals (media, phenomena, criteria, etc.) are formed by replacing the desinence of the singular with –a. This is admittedly a small lexical class, but its frequency has also conditioned a change in the history of English whereby the plural forms commonly supplant the singular for both numbers. Thus media is now generally construed as a collective singular––interestingly, with no plural (singulare tantum). There are even contemporary examples of scholarly writing where this change can be observed. Cf. the stylistic barbarism in the following sentence: ”Almost from the very beginning Sologub seemed to be a curious phenomena in Russian Symbolism, for reasons other than his background, profession or appearance.” (S. D. Cioran, “Introduction,” Fyodor Sologub: The Petty Demon [Woodstock: Ardis, 2006], p. 16. This may or may not be a genuinely native solecism, given the Romanian surname of the writer, but it was evidently not caught in proof and thus counts as such all the same).

The change at issue is unidirectional: the plural form always replaces the singular for both numbers. The fact that the normal English plural desinence –s fails to be attached in such words as media can be ascribed to the residual strength of the original meaning of the plural as the marked number. Be that as it may, ultimately the change can be construed as a consequence of the principle of iconism, here dictating that the shorter of the two variants be used as the form of the singular.

MICHAEL SHAPIRO

Do is undoubtedly the most protean verb in the English language. All one has to do to be convinced of this fact is to look under the entry in the Oxford English Dictionary.

A man and a woman, both of a certain age, come into a Vermontian tavern and sit down at the bar. They each order a glass of wine. When the bartender pours the drinks, there is some confusion as to which patron wishes the white, which the red, so the female customer says: “He does the white, and I do the red” [emphasis added––MS]. A strange utterance under the circumstances, no?

Whatever could she have meant? That her male companion habitually drinks white wine, and she red, implying that this distribution is at odds with the norm for the two sexes? It’s impossible to interpret the woman’s utterance with certainty.

One is reminded of the fact that just as characters in novels don’t always know their own motives, so with people in real life.

MICHAEL SHAPIRO

[Addendum on a personal note: I was sitting in a restaurant cogitating over what this post would contain when a well-known poem by that splendid Russian nineteenth-century lyric poet, A. A. Fet, hove into mental view. For those readers who have Russian, here it is (NB the last line and the preceding enjambment):

* * *

Я пришел к тебе с приветом,
Рассказать, что солнце встало,
Что оно горячим светом
По листам затрепетало;

Рассказать, что лес проснулся,
Весь проснулся, веткой каждой,
Каждой птицей встрепенулся
И весенней полон жаждой;

Рассказать, что с той же страстью,
Как вчера, пришел я снова,
Что душа все так же счастью
И тебе служить готова;

Рассказать, что отовсюду
На меня весельем веет,
Что не знаю сам, что буду
Петь – но только песня зреет.

M.S.]

When a youngish female speaker of American English uses air quotes––i.e., a gesture produced with hands held shoulder-width apart and at the eye level of the speaker, the index and middle fingers on each hand flexing at the beginning and end of the item being quoted–– so frequently as to constitute a verbal TIC, what does that signify?

One could easily interpret this paralinguistic behavior as a species of STAMMERING and thereby subsume it under the general cultural avoidance, especially among the younger generation, of any utterance constituting a straightforward assertion.

MICHAEL SHAPIRO

The success of the recent movie “The King’s Speech” has brought public awareness to what the British call stammering and Americans call stuttering. In the movie stuttering is a speech disorder in need of therapy, but stammering is actually part of a whole range of non-pathological phenomena now called disfluencies, including all sorts of interruptions of speech flow. These are typically inserted vocables like “you know,” “I mean,” and various combinations of vowels and consonants (“eh,” ”uh,” “uhm,” etc.), not to mention the currently near-ubiquitous (in North American English, at least) filler “like,” to be heard emanating from the mouths of female speakers below a certain age (45?) in particular.

This last-mentioned word is sometimes dignified by being labeled a “discourse marker” with an approximative or quotative function (among others). A more encompassing characterization would accurately ascribe its pervasive use to a discourse strategy resting on a cultural set toward the message by speakers who use it, viz. that no content is in need of direct ASSERTION: in fact every message, in this strategy, needs to be hedged. The word like is a compact means of implementing such a cultural set because it immediately weakens the assertory value of anything to which it pertains in the utterance.

Nothing could be a surer symptom of a shift in cultural values than the ubiquitous insertion of a word that immediately undercuts the directness of what is being stated. In the last analysis, it is a sign (an index, to be precise) of the speaker’s inability to be responsible for the VALIDITY of ANYTHING that can be asserted.

MICHAEL SHAPIRO

What used to be the standard way in American English of complimenting someone on a job well done, viz. “good work!” has largely been replaced by the phrase “good job.” This change in usage is underlain by a shift in the value system, as an analysis of the two variable words reveals.

The difference comes down to the fact that work applies as a noun to the AESTHETIC value of the object resulting from an action. We habitually designate, for instance, art objects as works, not jobs. One can be “good at one’s job” but not “good at one’s work.” One’s work can be one’s job, and in the latter sense job can connote one’s duty, whereas work does not. And so on.

This kind of trip through the connotations of the words at issue will always abut in the conclusion that the accomplished result of what we do when we designate the series of actions as job or work makes the first word concentrate on the acts and not on the product in the traditional usage that rewards the aesthetic value of the product with the designation work.

This value did not accrue in the past to job. Now it does, meaning a hierarchical superordination of the ACTION over the RESULT. In this way, American culture reinforces the axiological dominance of process over result that can be encapsulated in the motto “you are what you do.”

MICHAEL SHAPIRO

There is no doubt that reading pronunciations reign supreme when speakers are ignorant of the traditional pronunciation of a word. This state of affairs is particularly relevant when the word belongs to the class of nomina propria.

The Cambridge Pronouncing Dictionary (17^th ed., 2006) lists only one pronunciation for the name of the country of Bahrain, viz. without the h, and this is the traditional English version regardless of the authentic Arabic original. Yet Peter Kenyon, the NPR correspondent reporting from Dubai this morning (“Morning Edition”), repeatedly pronounced the word with an h, joining the majority of media representatives in their studied ignorance of the established phonetic form.

Ultimately, this kind of mistake is to be adjudged as yet another instance of the drive toward faux authenticity that besets American speakers of English in particular, abetted by an attitude that flouts linguistic precedent.

MICHAEL SHAPIRO

Every language has what are called morpheme structure rules. These are generalizations about what combinations of sounds are permitted in certain positions––initial, medial, and final. Some clusters of sounds that are permitted across morpheme and word boundaries are not permitted in word-initial or word-final position. Exceptions may be restricted to foreign borrowings. In English, accordingly, the combination ts- only occurs word-initially in borrowings such as tsetse fly. But because this cluster does not conform to native morpheme structure in word-initial position, it tends to get simplified in the speech of persons who cannot or choose not to make the phonetic effort to pronounce an unusual cluster, and the first consonant is elided in a process that is called by the technical term APHAERESIS. Thus ts > s.

A contemporary illustration of aphaeresis in English is provided by the word tsunami ‘tidal wave’, which has been borrowed from Japanese. While the initial cluster ts- is completely regular in the donor language, it contravenes the rules of English, thereby lending itself to simplification as [sunámi], a pronunciation commonly heard  these days––alongside the non-aphaeretic [tsunámi]––with reference to the recent catastrophe in Japan. Why the second member of the cluster and not the first is elided can be accounted for by the general rule pertaining to initial clusters in English whereby it is always the first and not the second member in this position, as in the pronunciation of words like knight, gnat, psychology, phthisis, etc., whose Old English pronunciation, resp. that in the donor language, involves an initial (unsimplified) cluster.

MICHAEL SHAPIRO