Archive for the ‘Phonology’ Category
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 »
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 »
July 26, 2022
… What a delicious Tweety you are!
The 7/24 Mother Goose and Grimm strip, with a police line-up of cartoon cats, for little Tweety to pick out the threatening pussy cat that he thought he saw:
(#1) The potential pussy predator perps on parade, left to right: 1 the Cat in the Hat (Dr. Seuss picture book), 2 Stimpy (Ren & Stimpy tv animation), 3 Sylvester (Looney Tunes film animation), 4 Catbert (Dilbert strip), 5 Attila (MGG strip — note self-reference), 6 Garfield (Garfield strip)
The number of domestic cats in cartoons is mind-boggling — there are tons of lists on the net — and then there are all those other cartoon felines: tigers, panthers, lions, leopards, and so on. Out of these thousands, the cops rounded up the six guys above — all male, as nearly all cartoon cats are, despite the general cultural default that dogs are male, cats female — as the miscreant. (It might be that male is the unmarked sex for anthropomorphic creatures in cartoons as for human beings in many contexts; females appear only when their sex is somehow especially relevant to the cartoon.) And that miscreant, the smirking Sylvester, is the only one of the six known as a predator on birds, though in real life, domestic cats are stunningly effective avian predators, killing billions of birds annually.
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Posted in Alliteration, Books, Child language, Comic conventions, Constituency, Gender and sexuality, Homosexuality, Language and animals, Language play, Linguistics in the comics, Movies and tv, Nonsense, Parody, Phonology, Poetry, Syntax, Understanding comics, Variation | 2 Comments »
May 1, 2022
🐇 🐇 🐇 pour le premier mai. A follow-up to yesterday’s posting “My allergic ass”, which was (mostly) about pronominal ass — possessive pronoun + ass, used of a person, to refer not to their buttocks but to that person: his ass ‘he, him’, your ass ‘you’, my ass ‘I, me’.
[Ambiguity may ensue: my ass is warm can mean either ‘my buttocks are warm’ or ‘I am warm’ (you have to figure out from context which was intended); while my ass is heart-shaped is probably about my buttocks (well, I might be Candy Man, shaped like a candy heart), and my ass is allergic is probably about me (though I might conceivably have buttocks afflicted by contact dermatitis).]
Now: through Facebook discussions, two different threads have emerged from that posting: one about material in a long citation in the 2006 Beavers and Koontz-Garboden paper on pronominal ass; the other about the source of the example — my allergic ass — that provoked my posting.
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Posted in Clothing, Compounds, Expressive language, Gender and sexuality, Homosexuality, Language and food, My life, Phonetics, Phonology, Phrasal overlap portmanteaus, Puns, Semantics of compounds, Underwear, Variation | 1 Comment »
September 1, 2021
🐇🐇🐇 It was 8/30, and the comic strip Mother Goose and Grimm went POP!, exploded in a phrasal overlap portmanteau, the one in the title:
(with the snow-sliding dog seen doing an airborne trick in the second panel of the strip).
Not your everyday POP, because it works straightforwardly in pronunciation but works only imperfectly in spelling:
snowboarder + border collie = snow border collie
Distinct spellings, boarder vs. border, homophones in both AmE and BrE (but see below).
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Posted in Dialects, Language and animals, Language and sports, Linguistics in the comics, Phonology, Phrasal overlap portmanteaus, Spelling, Variation | Leave a Comment »
August 19, 2021
(Well, yes, jockstraps, depicted and described, with attention to their contents, so not to everyone’s taste.)
In a comment on my 8/15 posting “Jock Robin” (a posting about jockstraps in beautiful colors, masculinity, and sexuality), Mike McManus noted the relevant novelty song “Harry’s Jockstrap” (a jock that’s pale blue, suggesting that Harry is a fairy), a burlesque on the French nursery rhyme (and round) “Frère Jacques”. I had somehow missed “Harry’s Jockstrap”, but here it is, in all of its pale blue fairy glory:
Harry’s jockstrap, Harry’s jockstrap
It’s pale blue, it’s pale blue
They say that he’s a fairy. But Harry is so hairy
So are you, so are you
(Call this verse HJ.) The burlesque goes on and on through many more verses; I’ll give you a transcription and a recording of the whole thing — but first, some background. (more…)
Posted in Color, Dialects, French, Gender and sexuality, Language and the body, Masculinity, Music, Parody, Phonology, Poetic form, Poetry, Underwear, Variation | 3 Comments »
June 26, 2020
A preliminary death notice for David Stampe, an old friend and hugely influential colleague in my work in linguistics. A first pass, deficient in many of the customary details about academic careers, reproducing the death notice on Facebook from David’s son John (with some amendments in square brackets):
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Posted in Death notices, Linguists, My life, Phonology | 7 Comments »
(#1)
