cheeky protuberances

Jack Windsor Lewis in his blog 408 describes the results of his consultations of various dictionaries with regard to the pronunciation(s) of the adjective callipygous. Had I been pressed to pronounce this word when I first came across this item hitherto unknown to me, I would have said: /kæˈlɪpɪgəs/. But most of the dictionaries place the main stress not on the antepenultimate but on the penultimate syllable.

credit: source unknown

Why so? A disclaimer first. "I am neither a Greek nor a Latin scholar. All statements, conjectures and hypotheses as to the stress assignment in Greek and Latin nouns and adjectives are likely to be erroneous and at best provisional."
After this exculpation here's my personal and private explanation:
According to the OED the adjective goes back to Greek καλλίπῡγος. The second constituent has a long < ῡ >. A long vowel means a heavy syllable, and a heavy syllable receives the stress in Latin. The consequence for callipygous is that the penultimate syllable should receive the main stress.This is what usually happened to such Greek polysyllabics that entered the English language via Latin.

On the other hand there's the beautiful writer, the calligrapher. The Greek καλλιγράϕος has a light penultimate syllable (no long vowel, no syllable-final consonant cluster), so the main stress falls on the penultimate in the Latin equivalent, which results in the English pronunciation /kəˈlɪɡrəfə/.
... I humbly await the wrath of the expert on Greek/Latin ...

My thanks go to J Windsor Lewis for drawing my attention to the word callithumpian, which according to the OED is a US colloquial term (adjective or noun) referring to a band of discordant instruments or to one of its band members. The stressing of the latter formation should be much less doubtful.

J Windsor Lewis mentions platypygous (with two y's in the OED) and steatopygous and adds the comment:

"We sadly seem t've [sic] allowed the attractive word platypigous for 'broad-bottomed' to lapse into obsoletion." 

True as this is in regard to the word as such, the concept, however, has definitely not fallen into oblivion - at least not for me.

Finally, I should like to make mention of Thomas Brown's Pseudodaxia Epidemica of 1646 (I checked the 4th ed. of 1658). Here we find this quotation:

 "If so, then men with great bellies will float downward, and onely Callipygæ, and women largely composed behind, upward." (p. 247) 

I'm not going to dwell upon the yucky details of this chapter.

Sir Thomas Brown (1605-1682)

Hotel Babylon

credit: BBC

Hotel Babylon is a TV drama commissioned by BBC One. In series 4 episode 6 the actress Alexandra Moen impersonating the PR manager of the hotel has to pretend to be a princess from the principality of Liechtenstein. She is required to say a few sentences/phrases in German as well as in English with a German accent.

Her first sentence is:
"I am  Princess Mariana of Liechtenstein and back home I have five pet pigs who share my bed ... [and after having been corrected by a bystander] ... pugs ...".

1. The actress pronounces am with a glottal stop and she uses the strongform of the auxiliary; both features are typical of German speakers of English.(I'm not insinuating English doesn't have glottal stops.)
2. In the word Liechtenstein the [ç] sounds pretty much like an inaudibly released [k], and the second syllable contains a schwa. A German speaker would normally replace the VC syllable by a syllabic [n̩]. Using a k-sound instead of the [ç] is typically English.
3. back should be pronounced with an [ɛ] to sound genuinely Denglish; the actor uses an [æ] instead.
4. The number five is pronounced without employing German word-final fortissification (= Auslautverhärtung); it should have been [faɪf], not [faɪˑv]. On the other hand, she does use Auslautverhärtung in pigs, although the i-vowel is too long
5. The actress tries to imitate the difficulties many German speakers of English have with the DRESS-TRAP distinction. She's not quite successful in her pronunciations of back and bed however.

photo credit: whatsontv.co.uk

More in a future blog post.

rejuvenated SID

It's a pleasure for me to announce that John Maidment's Speech Internet Dictionary (= SID) has been rejuvenated, redecorated and refurbished. Please take a look!
Here's the link:

SID

a word new to me

cover of 1st US edition

I've started reading Aldous Huxley's novel Point Counter Point of 1928. In chapter vii (on p. 106 of my Random House edition) I found this sentence:

One does not fall very desperately in love with a loud speaker, however pretty, however firmly plump [...], however attractively callipygous.

Callipygous (pronounced  /ˌkælɪˈpaɪɡəs/  (OED also offers /kælɪˈpɪdʒəs/)) means 'having well-shaped buttocks'. I wonder how often I shall be able to use this word in the future.

Update:There's a more extensive discussion of the topic by JWL in his PhonetiBlog No. 408.

new edition announced

credit: Wiley-Blackwell

The 2nd edition of Philip Carr's English Phonetics and Phonology is due out in September 2012. The 1st edition dates back to 1999. Philip Carr is Professor of Linguistics at the Université Paul Valéry Montpellier 3.

sorry for the tiny photo -
couldn't find a larger one

John C Wells

It has come to my attention that John Wells suffered a minor stroke on Wednesday (20th of June) and is now in a London hospital. I was told he is in good spirits. Please join me in wishing him a full recovery.

Update (1):

credit: www.stheliervts.co.uk

As of today (23rd of June), John is in St Helier Hospital, Carshalton in a ward which specifically cares for stroke patients.

Update (2):
John has started blogging again, though not yet on a regular basis. Now this seems very promising!

Update (3):

John suspended blogging from hospital because of the appallingly high prices for wifi and the less than satisfactory connection speed.

infection

I seem to have caught a trojan (or two) and I'm trying to get rid of them, which proves quite time-consuming. I shan't be able to post anything because I simply don't have the time.

Does anyone by any chance know how to reactivate the menu which normally pops up when you right-click a hard disk letter (e.g. C) or a folder name in the explorer? When I try to do this nothing happens. I have WIN XP with SP3 installed. My vague guess is that something went wrong in the registry.

Any suggestions, links etc. are appreciated.

I've found a solution to my 2nd problem - the one about the missing context menus in the WIN Explorer:

I had to 'hack' the registry. Somehow (maybe caused by the trojans) an entry had disappeared from the registry. I had to browse to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\Explorer, create the key 'NoViewConextMenu' and assign it the REG_DWORD value '0'. This makes context menus become visible again.

As regards my Trojan 'friends' I've caught two of them.

Aristocratic Eugenie

There's been a minute phonetic uproar about how to pronounce 'Eugenie', one of the daughters of the Duke of York. Not that I really care about how the name of this aristocratic offspring is pronounced, but from a phonetic viewpoint one is compelled, so-to-speak, to deal with the matter. Followers of John Wells's blog found a video clip on the internet featuring an interview with Eugenie's mother, Sarah Ferguson. These followers, including John C Wells himself, seem to hear a word-medial voiced fricative. I beg to differ here. To my ears this is more of a devoiced, if not voiceless fricative, so either [ˈjuːʒ̊əni] or /ˈjuːʃəni/. I favour the latter variant.

But decide for yourselves:

Halfway through the Knight

I've dug myself through 10 of the 20 units in Dr Rachael-Anne Knight's book with the short and succinct title Phonetics.

Unit 1 is a good intro to the relations between sounds and letters and the CV-structures of words.

Unit 2 introduces the concepts of voicing in general and of voiced consonants and the transcription symbols for GB consonants. On p. 18 we read the somewhat infelicitously formulated claim "that the speaker does not use muscles to open and close the folds for every cycle of the vibration." If you know what makes the folds open and close regularly to produce phonation, then the statement is okay. Without such knowledge, the reader might be a bit at a loss. The author continues her explanation: "Instead, muscles are used to narrow them by just the right amount, so that aerodynamic contraints take over and they vibrate in the airstream of the lungs [...]" (18).
 
On p. 20 in exercise 2.4 the reader is asked to

"[l]ook at the bold consonants in each word below.  
many feather check bat need "

 
What is set in bold type is letters representing consonants, not the consonants themselves. Granted - it's only a minor point.

Unit 3 deals with place of articulation and introduces both passive and active articulators. Some of the exercises, e.g. 3.6, are not intended for NNSs of English.

Unit 4 familiarises us with manner of articulation as another feature of consonant description.

Unit 5 shows how consonants are represented by the symbols of the IPA, and midsagittal sections as a means to illustrate articulator configurations for consonants are introduced.

Unit 6 deals with vowels, their similarities and differences to consonants are identified and the cardinal vowels are introduced. The FLEECE vowel is transcribed as /i/ and the KIT vowel as /ɪ/. Dr Knight justifies her choice like this: 

[...] as we have seen, /i/ and /ɪ/ are rather similar, but do differ in the height and frontness of the tongue. Since they are represented by different symbols (/i/ and /ɪ/), it seems unnecessary to distinguish them further by adding a length mark to the longer vowel (that is, /iː/). [...] The only time this can really cause us problems is when we transcribe vowels in unstressed syllables, like that at the end of 'happy'. [...] In this book we will transcribe both vowels as /i/, while remembering that there is in fact a difference in duration between the two.

This may be fine with NSs who grew up with the shortness of the final /i/-sound in words like city or happy. But when it comes to teaching English pronunciation and phonetics to NNSs, I beg to differ with the author. What may cause further confusion with the reader is a set of three transcriptions to be found on p. 76:

Complying with Ms Knight's rule/description/explanation that we ought to transcribe a short i-vowel in unstressed syllables as /i/, shouldn't anything in a), in in b) and believe, eleven and units in c) be transcribed with an /i/, i.e.  shouldn't it be /biliv/? (Why should we transcribe <to write> as /tu rɑɪt/ rather than /tə rɑɪt/, why is the diphthong in <write> /aɪ/ on p. 74 but /ɑɪ/ here and why is there no weakform plus linking-r indicated in the phrase <are on> in sentence b)? Just typos?)


In general the text is typeset flawlessly with the exception of fig. 6.2, where some of the vowel symbols are taken from different fonts (three, at least).

On p. 71 we are informed that /ə/ "only ever occurs in unstressed syllables". Really? Look up <because> in LPD3 or CPD18 and you find a pronunciation variant with schwa in the second, stressed syllable. And what about <just>? (See also this blog post by Jack Windsor Lewis).

In fig. 6.8 the /ɑ/ symbol is the only one which is inside the quadrilateral, whereas in fig. 6.10 it's printed on the outside as all the other primary cardinal vowels.

Unit 7 focuses on airstream mechanisms. Pulmonic egressive and ingressive, glottalic egressive (= ejectives) and ingressive (= implosives) and velaric ingressive (= clicks) sounds are introduced. Mention is even made of the velaric egressive airstream in section 7.5.4, although we could easily dispense with it as "no such sounds are found in human language" (96). 


Unit 8 discusses syllable division, ambisyllabicity, syllabic consonants and some effects of lexical and sentence stress. 


Unit 9 treats allophonic variation, the concept of the minimal pair, devoicing and aspiration while Unit 10 deals with variations in the place of articulation of consonants. Here the author shows that the place of articulation (= POA) of a consonant can be more advanced or more retracted if pronounced in a certain phrase or sentence than what the POA is in the canonical articulation of a consonant. 



More on the book in a future blog post.