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

Readers of this blog might want to head over to Heidi Harley’s blog, HeiDeas. Her most recent post is all about interesting recent developments in the question of human subjects policies concerning language consulting, something I think many of us are interested in (I certainly am, as I’ve noted here and here).

Does anyone out there know if there are any languages that have word- or syllable-initial /s/-clusters where the /s/ is followed by an aspirated voiceless stop (e.g. [sp^h-])?

Apparently, one currently popular way in the mainstream media to get around using a word that is taboo in some way or other is to say/write the X-word, where X is the first letter of the taboo word. Some examples are incredibly well-known; nobody doubts what the F-word refers to, for example. (One of Lindsay Lohan’s twin characters in the 1998 remake of The Parent Trap uses “the F-word” to refer to her father, but the joke is that her mother naturally misunderstands what she means at first. And yes, I watch sappy Disney movies.)

(According to the NYT article linked above, “every letter of the alphabet now seems up for grabs to euphemize something unspeakable. Examples of all 26 can be found in the conventional press from the last 12 months.” Wish they had supplied the examples; for example, I’d be really curious to know what the X-word would stand for.)

There’s usually little doubt about what the C-word means — I suppose it could be one of two words, but it’s usually the one and not the other. The one’s simply more taboo than the other, possibly because it’s more often used as a direct insult to a person. (The other is hardly ever used this way; it seems to only work in that capacity when suffixed with -sucker.)

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In case you missed the announcement at SIL or the follow-ups on Linguist List, Tenser, said the Tensor, and languagehat, a new phonetic symbol has been approved by the IPA for the first time in twelve years. It’s the symbol for a labiodental flap, and is referred to as right hook ‘v’. Here’s what it looks like:

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In his comment on my recent post on angst, Adam Ussishkin notes this recent piece by NPR ombudsman Jeffrey Dvorkin on language use on NPR, some of which happens to relate to my two posts last month on foreign pronunciation. Ben Zimmer writes to point to this response to some of what Dvorkin writes in the piece, which Ben found via languagehat. Here’s my favorite quote from the response:

Should we say “Pah-REE” instead of Paris? The former is linguistically correct, but that sounds très pretentious to American ears.
Uh, no. As Language Hat rather patiently points out, those pronuciations are French and English, not right and wrong.

Don’t know if there was meant to be a link to something that languagehat wrote, but a quick search for “french” reveals this recent post, among others.

For those who know me, I got what I asked for this morning: I turned on my local public radio station between the hours of 10 and 11 on a Sunday morning. That’s the time for our locally-produced show A Way With Words, hosted by Richard Lederer and Martha Barnette. What can I say, it was almost 11am, I was bored, and … well, I forgot.

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A couple new phonology book announcements were made over Linguist List today. I noted one here; the other is Hargus & Rice’s Athabaskan Prosody. The summary blurb:

This collection of articles on stress and tone in various Athabaskan languages will interest theoretical linguists and historically oriented linguists alike. The volume brings to light new data on the phonetics and/or phonology of prosody (stress, tone, intonation) in various Athabaskan languages, Chiricahua Apache, Dene Soun’liné, Jicarilla Apache, Sekani, Slave, Tahltan, Tanacross, Western Apache, and Witsuwit’en. As well, some contributions describe how prosody is to be reconstructed for Proto-Athabaskan, and how it evolved in some of the daughter languages.

There was an interesting post yesterday over at Language Log (by newest Language Logger Ben Zimmer) about the “perilous portmanteau” that people have been using as a nickname for Supreme Court nominee Judge Samuel Alito: Scalito, a blend of (Supreme Court Justice Antonin) Scalia and Alito. There has been a flurry of discussion about this blend in the news and on several blogs, much of it linked from Ben’s post. Here I’d just like to focus on the third update to Ben’s post, part of which reads (emphasis added):

Matthew Continetti of the Weekly Standard also takes offense at Scalito: “The nickname is misleading. The two men may share a vowel at the end of their last name. But, needless to say, they’re different people.”

At first, I’m thinking: this is so off the mark! Scalia and Alito share the whole VCV sequence ali, which is towards the end of Scalia and at the beginning of Alito. [Added later: another, perhaps better way to put it is that the first two syllables of both names includes the ali sequence, which is rhythmically identical in both cases.] That’s what makes the blend work (as a blend, putting aside how you might feel about its use). I had to read more of Continetti’s article in order to find out what he really meant.

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At a Halloween party Friday night, a friend of mine was dressed in jeans, white t-shirt, and black leather jacket. He would occasionally pull out a comb and somewhat dramatically comb his hair, then give two thumbs up and say “eeeeeeeeeyyyyy” — really slowly. His face was painted to look ashen, with dark circles around his eyes. He was Arthur Zombarelli, or the zombified version of Arthur Fonzarelli of Happy Days fame, better known as Fonzie or The Fonz.

So, by analogy with Fonzarelli → Fonzie → The Fonz, my friend explained that he was Zombarelli → Zombie → The Zomb — the last of these, of course, pronounced [za:m], though when I asked my friend or anyone else at the party to repeat that, they insisted it was [za:mb], with the final oral stop. When I pointed out how odd that was — going so far as to trot out the tired old bomb ~ bombard pseudo-paradigm — everyone would insist that the point is that it’s [fa:nz], not [fa:n], so it’s [za:mb], not [za:m]. Can’t argue with that (ana)logic.