Archive for the ‘Phonetics’ Category
April 2, 2024
An old One Big Happy strip, recently up in my comics feed, has Ruthie once again coping with vocabulary unfamiliar to her:
Cirque du Soleil (presumably pronounced in English, as if it were Sirk do sew-lay), obstetrician, and false alarm (which Ruthie takes to be circus ole, lobstertrician, and fossil arm, respectively). These are three different cases, as I’ll explain below.
But then — knowing that in the world around her, different people have different pronunciations for expressions — she takes her mother’s intended corrections of her creative misinterpretations to be just repetitions of them (“Mom always repeats the stuff I say”), but with a pronunciation alternative to hers. Attempted corrections of kids often run aground in similar ways.
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Posted in Dialects, Linguistics in the comics, Phonetics, Variation | Leave a Comment »
May 5, 2023
As a temporary diversion from some truly awful times in my life (which I will eventually post about), two reprised One Big Happy strips recently in my comics feed, in which Ruthie struggles to interpret language unfamiliar to her.
The strips.
(#1) The Iddle-Do Rule; which should lead us to reflect some on the distinction between circumstances in which “good enough for some purpose” — it’ll do — is the appropriate goal (the general case for most aspects of everyday social life) and the special cases in which a perfect performance is called for
(#2) Not Zarella cheese (with Not Zoball soup as a bonus); I note that Zarella is a fairly common Italian surname, which Ruthie (who is of Italian descent) might well be familiar with, so that a cheese named after a Zarella wouldn’t be at all surprising
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Posted in Dialects, Errors, Linguistics in the comics, Mishearings, Phonetics | Leave a Comment »
February 23, 2023
In my comics feed today, a One Big Happy originally from 1/6/03 (20 years ago, and that turns out to be important) in which Ruthie eggcorns the weatherman’s technical term windchill (factor) to Winchell’s (the name of a chain donut shop), which is more familiar to her — but not perhaps to most readers of the strip, even in 2003, when there were a lot more Winchell’s shops around than there are now. But the strip:
(#1) windchill / wind-chill / wind chill is a N + N compound meaning roughly ‘chill caused by wind’, but is in fact a technical term in metereology (and its connection to chill and wind might not be clear to someone who in passing hears tv reports mentioning the factor)
Especially the connection to wind, since pronunciations of wind chill in ordinary connected speech lack a [d].
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Posted in Eggcorns, Holidays, Language and food, Linguistics in the comics, Phonetics, Understanding comics | 2 Comments »
February 14, 2023
(#1)
Today’s Wayno / Piraro Bizarro (Wayno’s title “Pupper Love”) shows a teacup chihuahua deployed in a routine medical checkup:
(#2) Doctors ask you to say ah / ahh / aah so that you’ll open your mouth fully and they can then examine the back of the mouth, including the soft palate and the tonsils (If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 4 in this strip — see this Page.)
We will then be taken into the world of exclamations, lexical ones (like hi and yikes) and paralinguistic ones (like uh-huh and unh-unh), and the sociophonetics of ah – aw — which happens to be a familiar topic in English dialectology, thanks to the cot–caught merger, also known as the low back merger or the LOT–THOUGHT merger.
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Posted in Dialects, Language and animals, Language and medicine, Linguistics in the comics, Paralinguistics and kinesics, Phonetics, Phonology | Leave a Comment »
January 29, 2023
Today’s Zits strip manages to assemble three disparate bits of assumption about cognition into a joke about maternal shrillness:
(#1) So shrill — in particular, so high-pitched — that it takes a ladder to get up there and read what’s in the speech balloon
Whoa! You might not have subscribed to any or all of these cognitive stances built into the strip:
— conceptualizing speech and thought balloons as physical objects
— perceiving women’s speech as shrill — an impression that incorporates (among other things) sociocultural associations of high pitch and loudness with various personal and interactional states, and also the association of high pitch with femininity
— (metaphorically) associating high pitch with height above the ground
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Posted in Comic conventions, Language and gender, Linguistics in the comics, Perception, Phonetics | 1 Comment »
December 22, 2022
Two especially satisfying examples of the elfshelfism, a riddle form presented visually:
(#1) Image: a cute furry mammal clinging to a bone. Punchline: lemur on a femur. (note: like elf and shelf, lemur and femur are (perfect) rhymes; unlike elf and shelf, however, they’re rare and remarkable nouns)
(#2) Image: a buxom woman reclining provocatively on a pile of Mexican food. Punchline: Dolly [Parton] on a tamale. (note: for most American speakers, Dolly and tamale are perfect rhymes, but for a substantial minority of American speakers, and for many others, they’re half-rhymes)
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Posted in Books, Formulaic language, Holidays, Jokes, Language and animals, Language and food, Phonetics, Phonology, Rhyme, Riddles, Toys | 5 Comments »
December 13, 2022
A little posting, something I can get done in the time I have. I should explain that since 7 pm yesterday, I have slept 14 hours (and it’s not yet 2 pm). I don’t feel feverish, don’t have a fever, do have periodic crippling joint pain and muscle cramps in my hands and arms, but mostly narcolepsy rules; as the days roll on, it is, however, becoming less ferocious and more bearable.
Meanwhile, in my waking moments, while I practice muscle relaxation, I’ve had time to think about stuff. Thoughts that have expanded today’s intended Big Posting, on name mockery and Benedict Cumberbatch, into something even more ambitious. And random thoughts inspired by stuff that’s come in my mail, including an old topic: what (American) English speakers do with the somewhat challenging pronunciation of my family name, especially that word-initial consonant cluster [zw].
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Posted in My life, Phonetics, Phonology, Spelling | 2 Comments »
June 2, 2022
The 6/1 Wayno / Piraro Bizarro, a Desert Crawl cartoon in which the crawling man hallucinates a sexual oasis, where two saguaro cactuses offer to, umm, entertain him (Wayno’s title: “Prickly Playmates”):
(#1) (If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 4 in this strip — see this Page.)
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Posted in Comic conventions, Language and plants, Language of sex, Language play, Linguistics in the comics, Phonetics, Puns | 1 Comment »
