oozlum bird

A follower of this blog known to me (inter alia) by the sobriquet of Limey introduced me to a word hitherto alien to me:

www.wildwoodtoys.com

oozlum bird

The oozlum bird is such a rare bird so that even ornithologists are quite unaware of it. This bird must not turn left when flying. If it does, then it flies around in ever decreasing circles until it disappears completely in its own a---hole in a puff of blue air. These flight characteristics explain its rarity.

The phonetically interesting question is how to pronounce the name of the bird:

LPD remains silent as does EPD. OPD? Nada!

But OED is a reliable source here. For General American it suggests /ˈuzl(ə)m/, and for General British the proposal is /ˈuːzlʌm/ (why not /ˈuːzləm/ as well?).

AYBS

From a scene in Are You Being Served?:

Waiter: Madame, a nice apéritif!"
Mrs. Slocombe: Oh, thank you! And they're my own too."

Nice pun, innit?

new codification in the Deutsches Aussprachewörterbuch

 If you're familiar with the DUDEN Das Aussprachewörterbuch, the transcriptions of the new Deutsches Aussprachewörterbuch might be a shock to you. They're more detailed. They're fussier. They're more difficult to read and understand, at least for a person who consults it and is not a trained phonetician or does narrow transcriptions every other day.

Here are three sample entries:

Biermixgetränk	(beer-based mixed drink)
Empfehlungsschreiben	(letter of recommendation)
Heuschreckenplage	(plague of locusts)

If you feel happy with them - fine.

boat race

D'you know what a /ˈkɒksən/ is? It's a term used in nautical lingo and denotes the lad or lass in charge of a boat's navigation unless a superior officer is present. It's spelled <coxswain>. According to OED the term goes back to cock and swain. A cock or cock-boat is a small boat towed behind a ship. A swain is a young man attending to a knight. The spelling originally was cock-swain, but in the 19th c. the spelling coxswain established itself. Coxswain is often abbreviated to cox. 

Next question: D'you know what a coxed eight is? Well, there are boat races between colleges of various universities, e.g. between Oxford and Cambridge. The boat of a team sometimes has eight rowers and a cox; this is called a coxed eight.


Enough of this long 'foreplay'. What I actually wanted to tell you is this: There once was a boat race commentator for the Beeb - Howard Carpenter -  who came out with this double-entendre in 1977:

Isn't that nice! The wife of the Cambridge president is kissing the cox of the Oxford crew.

Thank you, Howard!

Disclaimer:  Any mis-interpretation of the above quotation is the sole responsibility of the reader of this blog post.

publication date postponed again

There's a further delay in the publication of Patricia Ashby's new book on phonetics, which was due out on the 29th of April this year. The new expected publication date now is the 29th of July.
Update: 30th of September

Deutsches Aussprachewörterbuch

2010 saw the publication of a new pronunciation dictionary of German - the Deutsches Aussprachewörterbuch, which is a competitor for the well-established DUDEN Aussprachewörterbuch (now in its 6th ed. of 2005). According to its preface the new dictionary contains about 150.000 entries including a large number of word groups (e.g. Meistbegünstigungsklausel [~ most-favoured treatment clause], Dies Irae). The dictionary aims at a "Neukodifizierung der Standardaussprache" (p. vii). Unlike EPD or LPD the publisher (deGruyter) does not offer a CD-ROM with sound files of pronunciations for every word. What we are offered is a link to audio samples which are mentioned in the theoretical part of the dictionary.
This theory part is fairly long; it is divided in three main sections dealing with the
A. standard pronunciation in Germany
B. standard pronunciation in Austria and the
C. standard pronunciation in German-speaking Switzerland.


One of the most interesting chapters is section A.7.3.4, which deals with the germanisation of English names and words. This section (to be found on pp. 138-143) was written by William J Barry, former (1992 - 2008) Professor of Phonetics at the University of Saarbrücken, Germany.

There are three blog posts on this dictionary available here. They made me get hold of the book. The price is €39.95.

More on the dictionary in a future entry.

Scottish extraction

credit: www.thechurning.com

In my previous blog entry I announced a disclosure as regards my ancestry. Here it is:
My paternal great-great-grandmother was Scottish. Alas, that's all I know about her.
When I was in Scotland two decades ago, I inquired about being allowed to wear a kilt: "/no:/" was the answer. They congratulated me, however, on having Scottish blood running through 'me veins'. The good thing about not being allowed to wear a kilt is that people won't try to turn me /arʊnd/. 

sorry lads!

BTW: Today is summer solstice on the Northern Hemisphere. Solstice is basically Latin sol (= sun) sistere (= stand still) and entered the English language via French solstice. The pronunciation is /ˈsɒlstɪs/ or /ˈsɒlstəs/.

giving away some private details

Yours truly decided to give away a secret about his ancestry in a future blog. If you're curious - do come back here!

Yorkshire accent

Your mother tongue accent pins you down in society and on a map:

credit: simply heaven food

A young boy in Yorkshire is found sobbing by the side of a river. A passer-by asks him: "What's the matter?" The boy tells him: "Me mate's fallen in t'watter." "How did that happen?" "I dunno. It just slipped from between t'slices o' bread."