Archive for the ‘Accent’ Category

Obscure plurals of octopus (and rhinoceros)

November 21, 2023

A brief, somewhat goofy spin-off from my 11/18 posting “The visiopun”, about plurals of the English noun octopus, which entertained mostly octopi (borrowing the Latin plural, but giving it an English spelling-pronunciation /áktǝpàj/) and octopuses (with the default plural suffix for English nouns), but also entertaining octopodes (borrowed from Classical Greek, so learnèd and obscure). The posting inspired a Facebook exchange today, starting with:

— Gadi Niram: I love the [four-syllable] plural octopodes, but it’s really not suited to most communication.

To which I replied:

— AZ >  GN (amplifying on GN’s reservations): It has the primary accent on the second syllable: òctópodes, like àntípodes. … At first I was hoping for óctopòdes or òctopódes, cleaving more closely to the accent pattern of óctopùs. But reality is weirder than that.

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Posted in Accent, Borrowing, Greek, Historical linguistics, Inflection | 1 Comment »

Cool [ʍɪp]

May 9, 2022

Voiceless /hw/ (phonetically [ʍ]) in a surprising place (the name of the artificial whipped cream Cool Whip), a place where even W-WH contrasters like me never have it. Made into a standing joke on The Family Guy. Which will cause me to tell you more about voiceless /hw/ in English than you might have wanted to know.

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Posted in Accent, Expressive language, Language and food, Movies and tv, Phonetics, Phonology, Trade names | 7 Comments »

The Triceramisu

August 24, 2021

A hybrid beast with a portmanteau name: Triceratops + tiramisu, that is, Tricera (tops) + (tira) misu:


(#1) A fine portrait of the beast, artist as yet unknown (it’s one of those cartoons that has been passed around on the net through many hands, with the artist’s identity suppressed; Google Images has been of no help, because it detects the tiramisu and then disregards everything else)

A fantastical creature with the body of a tiramisu and the extremities (head, tail, and four legs) of a Triceratops, the Triceramisu feeds from pools of espresso, fortified wines, and liqueurs in the fields of cocoa that abound in its native land of Portmantopolis; the creature lounges drowsily in the evenings in plate-like nests. The Triceramisu is irenic, amiable, and delicious, and has been known to offer itself as sustenance to other creatures in need of food. Because it’s inclined to spoil and to crumble, the Triceramisu is unfortunately (though gloriously) short-lived.

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Posted in Accent, Language and animals, Language and food, Linguistics in the comics, Poetry, Portmanteaus, Style and register | 4 Comments »

Welcome back gifts

December 9, 2020

An assemblage of recent appreciative gifts, mostly collected in this photo:


(#1) Objects of appreciation (in front of a wall mostly devoted to William Haefeli gay-themed cartoons from the New Yorker)

I do not disguise the fact that this photo is in part a demonstration of my mastering (slowly but successfully) yet another skill in posting to my blog: taking photos with my iPad, sending them to my Stanford account, and editing them there for publication. (As an example of the photographer’s art, it’s not much, but the point is that I can do it at all.)

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Posted in Accent, Language and food, Mammoths, My life, Penguins, Rainbow | 2 Comments »

Annals of category labels: food from a hole in the ground

August 28, 2019

… or edible roots (with root covering any underground plant organ), or whatever you call the stuff. In the 7/30 One Big Happy, Ruthie, confronted with /hol fudz/, takes it to be just such a label, hole foods, when her mother is referring instead to a grocery store, Whole Foods:

(#1)

The conventional (semi-technical) label for the category in question is root vegetables.

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Posted in Accent, Categorization and Labeling, Compounds, Gender and sexuality, Homosexuality, Language and food, Linguistics in the comics, Phallicity, Semantics of compounds, Vaginality | 3 Comments »

Exception-triggered alternation

August 25, 2019

Exhibit A: the joke routine That’s Good / That’s Bad from an Archie Campbell comedy sketch — discussed in my 7/22/19 posting “Oh that’s good”.

Exhibit B: the principles that predict when a N + N compound in English has primary accent on the first (modifier) N (front stress, or forestress) and when that accent falls on the second (head) N (back stress, or afterstress) — discussed in my old paper “Forestress and afterstress”, (OSU Working Papers in Linguistics, 1986, viewable on-line here).

From a sufficiently abstract point of view, these two phenomena can be seen to be manifestations of a single scheme, which I’ll refer to as exception-triggered alternation.

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Posted in Accent, Compounds, Homosexuality, Jokes, Opposition, Phonology | Leave a Comment »

hunter gatherers

January 27, 2019

The Bizarro from 2/7/15, noted on Facebook today by Nancy Caplow, who commented, “Potentially ambiguous compounds; subtly different prosody”:

(If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 5 in this strip — see this Page.)

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Posted in Accent, Compounds, Linguistics in the comics, Morphology, Semantics, Subsectivity | Leave a Comment »

sharp, sour

November 8, 2017

My morning name from a few weeks ago was the technical term oxytone. From NOAD2:

adj. oxytone: (especially in ancient Greek) having an acute accent on the last syllable.

with an etymology < Gk. ὀξύτονος, oxýtonos, ‘sharp-sounding’. with the first of our ‘sharp’ elements in modern English: OXY, oxy– (from Greek) or oxi– (from Latin).

As a prosodic term in Greek, it’s part of the set:

oxytone – paroxytone – proparoxytone

corresponding to the more familiar Latin terms:

ultimate – penultimate – antepenultimate

— that is,

final, last – next to last, second from the end – third from the end

OXY is familiar from the rhetorical term oxymoron < Gk. ὀξύς oksús ‘sharp, keen, pointed’ + μωρός mōros ‘dull, stupid, foolish’ — as it were, ‘sharp-dull’, referring to apparently contradictory combinations of expressions.

But wait, there’s more!

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Posted in Accent, Morning names, My life, Oxymoron | Leave a Comment »

the Ving N

August 9, 2016

Today’s Mother Goose and Grimm, with language play in honor of the Olympics:

V-PRP + N can be understood in several ways, sometimes subtly different, but potentially distinguished by accent pattern and often associated with ambiguities in the V. As with the opening ceremony here, with (roughly) the Olympic Interpretation ‘ceremony in which an event opens, that is, begins’ (with primary accent on ceremony) vs. the Can Interpretation ‘ceremony in which the top of something is removed to get at its contents’ (with primary accent on opening).
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Posted in Accent, Ambiguity, Compounds, Linguistics in the comics | Leave a Comment »

Familiarity

October 24, 2014

Yesterday’s One Big Happy, in which Ruthie goes (as usual) with the familiar over the novel:

(#1)

Stovepipe hat (an unfamiliar expression for Ruthie) is transformed in Ruthie’s ears into Stove Top Stuffing, a familiar expression in her world (context is crucial!), even though the two are pretty distant phonologically (very imperfect as a pun).

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Posted in Accent, Context, Language and food, Language in advertising, Linguistics in the comics, Phonology, Puns | 1 Comment »