Archive for the ‘Pronunciation’ Category
April 30, 2025
🐅 🐅 🐅 tiger tiger tiger for ultimate April; tomorrow the rabbit operatives of the revitalized Industrial Workers of the World will smash the tiger lackeys serving the corrupt octopus of big business and government; the Wobblies will, of course, dance onto the scene, tossing flowers to the audience (public service warning: do not eat the muguets; they are beautiful and sweet-selling, but toxic)
Previously on this blog. In yesterday’s “hoozamaflazamadoozamajillions 1”, a Lynn Johnston For Better or For Worse strip, (re)published on 6/19/24:
(#1) There are three linguistic things going on in this cartoon: the ambiguity of the verb count; the invented –illions words; and the thing [my correspondent Masayoshi Yamada] was puzzled by, the gigantic “nonsense nonce coinage” (as he put it) hoozamaflazamadoozama modifying jillions
Yesterday, things 1 and 2; today, thing 3.
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Posted in Accent, Connotation, Events and occasions, Language play, Linguistics in the comics, Nonsense, Poetic form, Pronunciation, Prosody, Rhyme, Semantics | 2 Comments »
February 22, 2025
A second follow-up on back-accented nadir in (American) English, now about the history of the word, whose antecedents in English include both front-accented pronunciations (as is — on the testament of dictionaries for British, American, and Australian English — standard throughout modern English) and back-accented ones (as I reported on in previous postings, with some surprise).
The questions are how English settled on front accent and where the exceptional back accent comes from, and I lack the resources to answer those questions, since the sources I have available to me provide spellings, not pronunciations, and accentuation isn’t marked in English spelling (so we have the homographic front-accented noun PRESENT and back-accented verb PRESENT). What I need is help from people who are familiar with the evidence on the accentuation of Middle French and Middle English (material that’s entirely unavailable to me; I don’t have access to a scholarly library).
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Posted in Accent, French, Language change, Latin, Pronunciation, Spelling, Variation | 2 Comments »
February 6, 2025
A first follow-up — there will be at least one more — to my 2/3 posting “The nuh-DEER” that reported on back-accented pronunciations of nadir ‘the lowest point in the fortunes of a person or organization’ (NOAD), based on what I heard as MSNBC went past me while I was working at my computer (but then was unable to find on the MSNBC site). Now, a bit of clarification.
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Posted in Pronunciation | Leave a Comment »
February 3, 2025
Caught out of the corner of my ear on 2/1 and 2/2, discussions on MSNBC (which might have been re-plays from earlier dates, I haven’t been able to tell) with Nikole Hannah-Jones (creator of The 1619 Project), about the Nadir, or Great Nadir, of American race relations. I’ve since looked up some information on the subject (see below), but what got my attention was the pronunciation of nadir — back-accented nuh-DEER /nǝdír/ or sometimes nay-DEER /nèdír/ — that everyone involved used all throughout these exchanges; it stood out like the proverbial sore thumb because, I’m sure, I’d never heard it before. It was totally bizarre.
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Posted in History, Pronunciation, Race and ethnicity | 5 Comments »
December 1, 2024
Another Rabbit Day item in the stew (see my earlier posting today “Rabbit stew 1: Asian soup spoons”), taking off from this Facebook posting by Greg Morrow yesterday (with some editing by me):
In sort of an opposite of the pen–pin merger [AZ: in which syllable-offset /ɛn/, as in pen, and /ɪn/, as in pin, are both realized as [ɪn]], local dialect (including mine) has [vǝnɛlǝ] vanella as the pronunciation of vanilla [vǝnɪlǝ].
(Heard it today in the grocery, and I was like, yes that’s right, wait a second…)
A further comment went on with the idea that this ɪ > ɛ (before l) that gives widespread US vanella was in some way the opposite of the ɛ > ɪ (before n) shift that gives us US midlands inkpin [ɪŋkpɪn] ‘(ink)pen’.
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Posted in Dialects, Lexicography, Pronunciation, Variation | 8 Comments »
October 13, 2018
The fall special at Dan Gordon’s (on Emerson St. in Palo Alto), as it first appeared on the menu, about a month ago:
Summer Stew $16.95
smoked pork / cippolini onions / chic peas / prunes / red rice
(with the very notable spelling chic peas and with the misspelling cippolini for cipollini). But now the ingredients list reads:
smoked pork / cippolini onions / chickpeas / dehydrated plums / red rice
(with the notable dehydrated plums). Actually, all four ingredients have linguistic interest.
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Posted in Ambiguity, Compounds, Conversion, Errors, Euphemism, Italian, Language and food, Language and plants, Lexical semantics, Morphology, Pronunciation, Spelling, Subsectivity, Typos, Verbing | Leave a Comment »
September 3, 2018
… with a note on the pronunciation of botanical names.
The crucial moment came in a re-run showing of the Rizzoli & Isles episode “Love the Way You Lie” (S3 E12, first aired 12/4/12), when the Boston detective (Rizzoli, played by Angie Harmon) and medical examiner (Isles, played by Sasha Alexander) pondered the significance of the fact that they had identified some pollen as coming from Solidago macrophylla, with the species name macrophylla pronounced /ˌmækroˈfɪlǝ/ (with primary accent on the third syllable). I was startled by the pronunciation: it’s Greek ‘big leaf’, so surely it should have the accent on the second syllable (as in thermometer, Hippocrates, etc.), something on the order of /mǝˈkrafǝlǝ/, and the writers had just gotten it wrong.
But no. The writers did their homework, and I was the one who was wrong.
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Posted in Actors, Gender and sexuality, Language and plants, Movies and tv, Pronunciation, Technical and ordinary language | 2 Comments »
