sound additions

credit: LOL phonology at facebook

Adding a sound segment to a word without changing its meaning is one of the many English passtimes. English speakers add a vowel (as in /fɪləm/ for film) or 'stretch' a hamster by calling it /hæmpstə/. This insertion process is often called epenthesis. Some academics use instead the terms anaptyxis (adding a vowel, the so-called svarabhakti vowel, between consonants) and excrescence (adding a consonant between consonants). If you add a sound segment word-initially (e.g. Latin status became Spanish estado), we call this prosthesis or prothesis; glueing a sound to the end is called paragoge. Would the change from among to amongst be an example (with -st being an old genitival ending)? Can anyone out there come up with an English word exemplifying present-day pro(s)thesis?

BTW: You get the pun in the blog title, don't you?

rant alert

I'm sorry but I must get this off my chest.
I've started reading a scholarly book on the phenomenon called foreign accent. In the book's first chapter the author, a renowned professor at an American university, mentions the often repeated idea that children normally master their mother tongue, whereas if adults start learning an additional language they do not reach the same high level. To which the author adds the remark that this widely believed fact has been challenged. Included in round brackets is a reference to Spada 2011. Not knowing this source I consulted the reference section and found this:

Nina Spada
credit: University of Toronto

Spada, N. (2011). SLA research and L2 pedagogy. Misapplications and questions of relevance. Presentation to Second Language Research Forum, Iowa State University, Ames, IA.

Not very helpful - not helpful at all - and a nuisance!
Don't we write books for the academic readership? Don't we write them so that our colleagues are enabled to evaluate our statements, hypotheses, theories? Don't we all rely more or less on written sources when we give credit to what some other person thinks about the topic? Don't we all check the odd reference to an article in a journal or to a monograph? Yes, we do! How can we countercheck what Professor Nina Spada opined on that conference if we did not attend that forum or conference or whatever it was?

/smuːðd brɪtɪʃ fɑːpɑː/

Listen to this short sound clip taken from a speech by the retired Major General Patrick Cordingley, who speaks about the Iraqi war. (Sorry; I can't use proper IPA symbols in blog titles - or at least I don't know how to do this.)

a chance find

I've been skimming through Johan Storm's 1881 book Englische Philologie - Anleitung zum wissenschaftlichen Arbeiten. I. Die lebende Sprache. 1. Abteilung: Phonetik und Aussprache (Heilbronn) and found this on p. 15
:

 Ein Deutscher wurde in England gefragt, wie alt er und seine Frau wäre. Er antwortete: "I am dirty and my wife is dirty too [thirty-two]"

(A German was asked in England, how old he and his wife were. He replied: "...". Many Germans replace /θ/ and /ð/ by /s/ and /z/ respectively, but a few pronounce /d/ instead.)

vernal messenger

Is spring about to arrive?

IPA 1900 - cont'd no. 2

What were the books recommended to the readers of the Exposé des Principes de l’Association Phonétique Internationale in 1900?
This is a scan of the 2nd page of the booklet with these recommendations:

Here is some additional bibliographical information on some entries:
1 A. W. Burt, A manual of elementary phonetics. Toronto 1898 [available online here]
2 J. Storm, Englische Philologie - Anleitung zum wissenschaftlichen Arbeiten. I. Die lebende Sprache. 1. Abteilung: Phonetik und Aussprache. Heilbronn 1881 [available online here]
3 Elements of phonetics is an adaptation and translation of Vietor's Kleine Phonetik by Walter Rippmann
I forgot to supply additional information on:

• Charles H. Grandgent, Vowel measurements. Deprinted from the PMLA, Suppl. to vol. 5, no. 2, 1890 [available online here]

IPA 1900 - cont'd no. 1

Henry Sweet prepared the transcription of the Southern English version of the text which you can see in my blog entry of the 4th of April. There's also a Northern English version ( = Anglais du Nord) prepared by Richard J Lloyd. Northern English refers to an area roughly between Birmingham and Durham¹. Lloyd was reader in phonetics at the University College, Liverpool. He published a book in 1899 with the title Northern English - phonetics - grammar - texts (Leipzig etc.).
Here's his Northern English version:

---------
¹see p. 8, § 7 of W. Scholle, G. Smith, Elementary phonetics - English, French, German, (Glasgow, Dublin, 1903)

IPA 1900

While preparing my new lecture course on English phonology for the upcoming term I found an online copy of the Exposé des Principes de l’Association Phonétique Internationale published in Bourg-La-Reine in 1900. Here are two short texts to be found on p. 14, one of them transcribed by Henry Sweet in "Anglais du Sud", the other by Wilhelm Viëtor in "Allemand". The symbol set is the one proposed by the API/IPA in that year. 

 

Some of the pronunciations of English words sound fairly old-fashioned and stilted (as do parts of the German text), others haven't changed much - or at all, e.g. your, generally, translation.

credit: Vanessa Pike_Russell

credit: R0Ng

credit: Auntie_P