phonoloblog | all things phonology | camba.ucsd.edu/phonoloblog

I discovered recently that I pronounce young, long and strong with a final [g]. I seem to do it phrase-finally and before a following vowel initial word. It seems to be optional, but I have a clear intuition that this pronunciation is OK with these words, and not with any other engma-final words. What these have in common is that they are the adjectives that take comparative /-er/.

I found this out because my girlfriend made fun of me for pronouncing the final [g]. I didn’t believe her at first, because I know English phonology isn’t supposed to work this way, but then I caught myself doing it. I was pretty pleased when I finally figured out the generalization - it’s kind of interesting that the derived form is determining the form of the base.

So, I’m wondering whether this is my own innovation, or whether anyone has heard of anything like this. I haven’t had a chance to quiz my family and hometown friends yet…

When I recently upgraded by operating system to Mac OS 10.4 (Tiger), I was amused to discover that the new Dictionary application has an option to give IPA pronunciations. Well, amused and slightly apprehensive, thinking that suddenly it might be a whole lot easier to simply look up the answers to transcription assignments. As it turns out, that fear was unfounded.

As it happens, Apple must have made some kind of coding error when converting the symbols for the New Oxford American dictionary, so (almost?) all the [æ]’s come out as [ø]. They also got the stress marks switched, so [ˌ] marks primary stress, and [ˈ] marks secondary stress, and some symbol which I guess must have been meant as a barred i [ɨ] shows up as the number ‘1′ (though I’m not able to determine the principles that govern when it is used, rather than a schwa or lax [ɪ]).

Another (probably intentional) glitch is that flaps are systematically indicated as [d] (a common dictionary pronunciation “feature”)

ˌhøpin1s ɪz eɪ n(j)u ˌmøkənˈtɑʃ ˌɑpəˈreɪdɪŋ ˌsɪst1m.

There’s a new publisher in linguistics called Equinox Publishing, which (as I noted back in June) will be publishing a book series called Advances in Optimality Theory starting in May 2006. I was just taking a coffee break and wanted to look them up to see if they were up to anything new, but I forgot their domain name; instead of searching for my June post to find it, I googled “equinox publishing” — and was surprised to find that the top result was EQUINOX PUBLISHING INDONESIA - not the London-based usurper www.equinoxpub.com. (The “London-based usurper” was the one I was looking for, and it was the second main result of the search.) (more…)

[ Update, Sept. 21: I've decided to write the substance of this post up as a squib, which I've just posted to ROA. Comments welcome! ]

I just finished what I hope are final revisions for an article that has been accepted for publication in Phonology (tentatively for vol. 22, issue 3). One of my reasons for this post is to distribute the paper for comments, suggestions, etc. The other is to comment further on what I think is a significant result of the paper.

The result is sufficiently clarified in the paper itself, but I think there’s something to be gained from some perspective on how I got there and what I think it means beyond the immediate context of the paper. As we all (phonologists, linguists, academics …) know, it’s typically a bad idea for your paper to simply march the reader through your thought process as you arrived at your ultimate solution to a problem, and so my paper does not do any of that (though there were vestiges of that sort of thing even in recent drafts). But, for those who are interested, there is always phonoloblog. (more…)

Yesterday I threatened my introductory phonetics class by telling them that by taking my class, they were consigning themselves to a torturous life. All of a sudden, anything anyone says will become fodder for observation and analysis! I told them that they’d find themselves sitting on airplanes, thinking about things like what I’m about to write.

Say the word “continental”. Quick! Write it down in IPA before moving on!

{blank space here to distract you}

Now say the word “sentimental”, and write that one down in IPA too.
(more…)

Aristotle was famously mistaken about at least one aspect of the human vocal anatomy: he believed that women had fewer teeth than men. Various people, notably including Bertrand Russell, have pointed this out as an example of Aristotle’s lack of concern for empirical evidence; others have suggested that he was motivated in his assertion by deliberate or subconscious misogyny.

At any rate, the Gendered Dentition Disparity Hypothesis does not seem to be taken very seriously these days, except as a symptom of Aristotle’s thought. I would be very surprised, for example, if a journalist were to interview a few dentists and then write a newspaper article announcing that, hey, it turns out women have just as many teeth as men after all! I would be even more surprised if the journalist were a woman.

And yet somehow I am not terribly surprised to find, on the front page of today’s Toronto Star, an article by Oakland Ross, who, having interviewed a few local voice coaches, reveals that Canadians don’t really say ‘oot’ and ‘aboot’. (Ross is, as far as I know, a Canadian himself; he begins the article with the words “Yes, fellow northerners, there is a Canadian accent.”) (more…)