The New Clear Option

Hunter — Thu, 26 Dec 2013 15:28:40 +0000

I’d like to make a quick pass of today’s Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal strip:

Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal for December 26, 2013

First, I think it’s funny. I get the joke, and it’s a good one. SMBC is a great comic, and one that I read regularly through my RSS reader. That’s my disclaimer, since I’m about to pick nits, but they do not in any way make the comic unfunny or unworthy of your own subscription.

But: “nuclear” does not have only two syllables, even in the standard pronunciations. The IPA options are [ˈnu kli ɚ], [ˈnju klɪ ə], or [ˈnu kjə lɚ] (see below). The two-syllable option I assume would be with the diphthong [ˈnu klɪɚ], as if it were “new clear”. To me, it sounds similar to the difference between “likelier” and “like Lear”.

The real dig of the comic, though, is at that third option, [ˈnu kjə lɚ], as if the word were spelled “nucular”, which is also a completely different word, the adjective form of “nucule”. Dictionary.com calls applying that pronunciation to “nuclear” an example of metathesis, the transposition of sounds, as when someone pronounces “ask” as if it were “ax”. Merriam-Webstar comes right out and labels it non-standard. Since the George W. Bush presidency, this non-standard pronunciation seems to have become even more vilified or ridiculed, since politics makes anything divisive more appealing, but there are other “non-standard” pronunciations that seem to be making gains toward acceptability.

Merriam-Webster, for example, also labels the pronuciation [ˈɔf tən] for “often” as non-standard, but I hardly ever hear “often” pronounced [ˈɔ fn̩] to rhyme with “soften”, no matter how educated the speaker or what accent they have. Amusingly, the “ax” pronunciation of “ask”, like the “acrosst” pronunciation of “across”, warrants only the label “dialect” or “chiefly dialect”, rather than “non-standard”.

Like the way the letters we use can affect the way we think about sounds (in the recent “Throwing in the Vowel” post), the pronunciations we use can affect the way we think about words. Check out Going Nucular: Language, Politics. and Culture in Confrontational Times for more about this (mis)pronunciation and other spins on words.

—jhunterj

Throwing in the Vowel

Hunter — Sat, 21 Dec 2013 18:57:39 +0000

A subjective diagram of relative mouth positioning for English/IPA vowels by Wikimedia Commons user Ordoon

If you’re a native English speaker, you probably learned in elementary school that there are five or six vowels: a, e, i, o, u, and sometimes y. The letters that aren’t vowels are consonants. It’s a nice enough rule of thumb, and serves many purposes well.

But it’s not quite accurate.

First, there is a tiny set of words that would make this list “a, e, i, o, u, sometimes y, and very rarely w“. A cwm is a type of valley, and a crwth is a crowd, for example.

More importantly, though, there’s the problem that vowels are aural and letters are visual. In linguistics terms, the letters are graphemes while the vowels are phonemes (and possibly diphthongs and triphthongs, depending on which linguist is doing the labeling). There’s another -eme to complete the language triumvirate: graphemes are units of a language’s written representation, phonemes are units of a language’s spoken representation, and sememes are the units of a language’s meaning. English graphemes include letters, numbers, and punctuation. Phonemes are where you’ll find the vowels and consonants.

We try to line up the graphemes with the phonemes, but it’s a messy network of mappings once you get through all of English’s oddities, like the consonant sounds at the beginning of one, ewe, or union, or the vowel sounds in myth and cwm, or the derivation of ghoti. The network got a good shakeup during the Great Vowel Shift.

So instead, linguists created a new alphabet of graphemes that has a one-to-one mapping with the phonemes. It’s called the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). American English’s vowel sounds are

[i] (long e) as in seat
[ɪ] (short i) as in sit
[eɪ] (diphthong, long a) as in sate
[ɛ] (short e) as in set
[æ] (short a) as in sat
[ɑ] (short o) as in sot
[o] (long o, also part of the diphthong [oʊ]) as in so
[u] (long u) as in suit
[ʊ] as in soot
[ʌ] (short u) as in shut
[aɪ] (diphthong, long i) as in site
[aʊ] (diphthong) as in shout
[ɔɪ] (diphthong) as in soy
[ə] (schwa) as in the middle of separate, if you say it with three syllables
[ɹ̩] (syllabic consonant) or [�?] (rhotic vowel) as in shirt
[l̩] (syllabic consonant) as in subtle

or something close to that.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2bCM9RnDBZw

The graphemes we use to represent phonemes influence the way we think about English. As I mentioned at the beginning, we tend to think that there are 5 or 6 vowels in English, because we use 5 or 6 letters to represent them. Another example: because we write the unvoiced and voiced versions of most consonant pairs with different letters (e.g., [t] and [d], both alveolar stops) , we tend to think of them as “more different” than the unvoiced and voiced pair of dental non-sibilant fricatives [θ] and [ð], both of which we spell with th (e.g., thin and then), and tack a “silent e” on when we need to, as in teeth and teethe.

So keep all this in mind when people tell you that English is one of the hardest languages to learn.

—jhunterj

jhunterj.com » linguistics

The New Clear Option

Throwing in the Vowel