Lagers and loggers

Chris Waigl sends on the cartoon below, displayed in Silver Gulch (“America’s northernmost brewery”) in Fox, Alaska:

For Chris, lager and logger are a minimal pair (with an unrounded vowel in the first syllable of the first, a rounded vowel in the second); for me, they are homophones (with an unrounded vowel in both), which blunts the effect of the joke.

The history and dialectology of low back vowels in English is extraordinarily complex; the Wikipedia entry on the phonological history of the English has a detailed account of the situation, taken from scholarly sources.

With respect to the low back vowels, Chris’s variety of English approximates British RP (“Received Pronunciation”), where there are three phonemically distinct vowels in this phonetic space:

an unrounded long vowel (in father and cart);

a rounded long vowel (in law and caught);

a rounded short vowel (in bother and cot).

My system in this domain is a subtype of GA (“General American”), which has two phonemically distinct vowels:

an unrounded long vowel (in father, bother, and cot; my variety is rhotic, so cart is not directly relevant here);

a rounded long vowel (in law and caught).

Note that I don’t generally have the cot/caught merger that is fairly widespread in American English (usually in favor of an unrounded vowel), but like many GA speakers, I have the merger in some words. As it happens, log is one of them; I have a rounded vowel in dog, but an unrounded vowel in log and also logger (and for some words I have alternative pronunciations), though many GA speakers have a rounded vowel in all three words.

So logger and lager end up being homophones for me (but a minimal pair for Chris Waigl).

(Note: normally I allow comments on this blog, but I’m closing them for this posting, because my experience is that the topic provokes a cascade of unproductive comments about people’s pronunciations of specific words. It’s well known that there are a great many varieties and sub-varieties of English in the domain of low back vowels; that there’s also variation in the treatment of specific words; and that all this variation is associated — but not rigidly — with geography, social class, age, and other non-linguistic factors. Information from particular people about particular words doesn’t advance our knowledge, entertaining though it may be to exchange anecdotes about the way we talk.)

Toons and tunes

At breakfast yesterday, my granddaughter Opal (aged 5) used the word tune in conversation, and I noted with some surprise that she said [tjun]. Surprise because these days around here, I would have expected [tun]; “yod-dropping” after alveolar consonants (including t d n) when they are in the same syllable is widespread  in “General American” and has been increasing for many years (though the details are very complex), despite mockery of pronunciations like “Toozday” in the media. Opal no doubt picked the yod up from her parents (and her mother from her mother, Elizabeth; my usage is variable).

We moved on to the Warner Brothers series of animated comic short features (Bugs Bunny, Porky Pig, the Roadrunner, and so on), the name of which Opal pronounced as [luni tjunz], and she was quite firm about the yod. My visual recollection was that the second word was spelled TOONS (as in cartoons), though Elizabeth was sure that it was TUNES (sometimes misspelled TOONS, so that I might well have seen that spelling) — and since Opal is fond of some of these cartoons, especially the Roadrunner, Elizabeth had seen the LOONEY TUNES logo many times. Of course she was right.

Then it turned out that Opal had [tjun] in cartoon (where [tun] is standard) as well, quite possibly as a carryover from the tunes of Looney Tunes. We didn’t press a correction on her; little kids are resistant to explicit correction in such things, and Opal is especially resistant (well, obstinant).

Distinguished alum

A few days ago I came across the following on Paul Dickson’s website:

Dickson, born in Yonkers, NY, graduated from Wesleyan University in 1961 and was honored as a Distinguished Alumnae of that institution in 2001. (link)

This caught my eye because Dickson is an author and free-lancer who writes about language, among other things. On his website, he says that he “now concentrates on writing about the American language, baseball, and 20th century history”. But he uses alumnae as a singular referring to a man, namely himself.

Dialect aside

Clyde Haberman’s NYC column in the NYT on May Day looked at New York City area secession efforts: Staten Island seceding from the city, New York City seceding from the state, Long Island seceding from the state, and more. On the Long Island case, Haberman writes that a

grievance about being Albany’s “stepchild” impels the Suffolk County comptroller, Joseph Sawicki Jr., to call for an independent state of Long Island (which, one can only hope, will not be pronounced Lawn Guyland).

Pity that Long Island can’t be mentioned without an aside taking a dig at the stereotypical pronunciations associated with the island.

Lots of webhits for {“Lawn Guyland”}, including sites offering t-shirts, bumper stickers, and other paraphernalia with LAWN GUYLAND printed on them. Orders of magnitude more than items imprinted KLUMBUS, AHIA.

Linking i

Geoff Pullum’s Language Log posting “Retching schedule” elicited comments on each of the pronunciations that drove the Guardian’s Tim Footman to displays of anger and disgust: mischievious, schedule with [sk-], somethink. I had something to say on the first of these, which I’ll expand on here.

Evil FEEN

An exchange, a few days ago, between Elizabeth Daingerfield Zwicky and her daughter Opal (who will be 5 on Wednesday), as reported on the On the Other Hand blog:

Complaining about my desire to pick up the Lego: “You are a FEEN. An evil FEEN, I tell you! Wickedness!” “A fiend, you mean?” “Not a feed, a feen! An evil nasty horrible thing.”

Clearly, Opal was aiming at (her version of) the word fiend, except that for her, the final [nd] cluster has been simplified. When her mother produced her own version of the word, with a [d], Opal took the [d] to be the salient phonological feature of the coda and disregarded the nasality (which might have been realized in her mother’s speech merely as nasalization of the vowel) — so she perceived her mother’s production as an instance of the word feed.

It’s easy to disregard vowel nasalization as a cue for a nasal stop in lexical representation, especially when many speakers have spontaneous nasalization of vowels. Listeners learn to disregard spontaneous nasalization and so sometimes fail to detect a lexical nasal; HADLE is a surprisingly frequent misspelling of HANDLE, as on this website devoted to handle bags (or “hadle bags”, as the webpage has it).