I don’t often disagree with John Wells, but I have to make an exception in the case of his blog entry for yesterday (St George’s Day 2008 - 23 April). He says:
“In the respelling systems I designed first for the Reader’s Digest Great Illustrated Dictionary (1984) and then later for the Encarta World English Dictionary (1999), with their spin-offs (pictured), I introduced the idea of making use of doubled consonant letters.”
No, he didn’t introduce this idea - the BBC has been using double consonant letters in its respelling system since the first edition of Broadcast English I: Recommendations to Announcers Regarding Certain Words of Doubtful Pronunciation (1928). The system in use by the BBC now is rather more sophisticated than that, which was devised by Arthur Lloyd James, but the principle remains the same. Here are a few examples from that first publication, with the traditional orthography in brackets:
áddults (adults), bárraazh (barrage), bássolt (basalt), bíttewmen (bitumen), éppilogg (epilogue), répplikka (replica), wésslĭan (wesleyan).
John must have been at least subconsciously aware of the BBC system - which he was presumably already familiar with from the BBC Pronouncing Dictionary of British Names, which uses what the BBC calls its Modified Spelling alongside an IPA transcription - when he started work for the Reader’s Digest.
Where I do agree with John is his initial statement that most users of dictionaries fail to read the introductory material, material that is just as important as the alphabetical entries when it comes to interpreting the editors’ intentions.
Traditionally, since the days of Arthur Lloyd James and Kenneth Lee Pike, languages have been divided into two broad types: syllable-timed and stress-timed. French was considered the archetypal syllable-timed language (Lloyd James called this ‘machine gun rhythm’), in which each syllable had a similar duration, and English, probably the language whose rhythm has been studied most intensively, and mostly by native English speakers, the archetypal stress-timed language, in which stresses occur at approximately equal intervals of time. Doubt has been cast on this classification, because the measurements taken by phoneticians using ever more sophisticated machines have shown that neither syllables nor stresses are truly isochronous.
Phoneticians need to consider the case of music, which is, like language, a form of “organised sound”, and which also consists of variation in pitch, timing and intensity. Drum machines create mathematically exact rhythms, which humans cannot do. Human performers, on the other hand, produce interpretations of musical works which are not mathematically precise, but are still, nevertheless, rhythmical. Bach is considered to be one of the most scientific of composers, but electronic renderings of his music, while rhythmically precise, are lifeless. Performances by a human interpreter, however, can move the listener deeply. Composers using ‘Sibelius’, or one of the other suites of music software, find that they have difficulty using a (piano) keyboard to play in the rhythm that they want to be recorded, because the software recognises the minute differences of duration between the notes, and transcribes what it “hears”, leading to tiny fractions of beats being notated when they are not intended.
It is perhaps no accident that many phoneticians through the years have also been proficient musicians. As phoneticians, we need to learn more about the way in which we hear musical rhythm, and apply that knowledge to how we hear language. It has often been reported that interlocutors take up each other’s rhythms in a conversation. How can they do this if there is no rhythm to take up? Measuring durations of sounds in milliseconds will not work: rubato, accelerandi and rallentandi cannot be accounted for in such terms. Instead, a more impressionistic approach is needed, that will allow for the nuances of expression that are conveyed by rhythmical variation.
It may well be that there are more than the two types of linguistic rhythm, or that there is a gradient from extreme syllable timing to extreme stress timing, but I believe that it is our ears, not our machines, that will decide this in the long run.
Angshu, in a comment on my ‘Afghanistan’ post, has been critical of my reasoning for recommending the English pronunciation of Afghanistan even to Mishal Husain, who uses a variant that may or may not be an Afghan (whether Dari or Pushtu) pronunciation.
Angshu appears to be saying that a bilingual French and English speaker should pronounce the capital of France in the French way when speaking English. Presumably I, in the same way, should continue to pronounce London in the English fashion when I am speaking French (even though I am not bilingual), and ignore the fact that French has a perfectly good version - Londres. Most English speakers know that Germany is called Deutschland in German. Are newsreaders to say “In Deutschland this afternoon …”? That way madness lies.
When Mishal Husain is speaking Punjabi, or Urdu, or whatever her other language is as a bilingual speaker, then I would expect her to call England by whatever it happens to be in that language, and not “England”. Likewise, when she is speaking English, it is mere pretension to affect a Punjabi/Urdu pronunciation for a South Asian place name, when there is a well-established English version.
The debate over the pronunciation of Pres. Sarkozy’s name rumbles on. John Wells today seems to be advocating middle syllable stress as the obvious one for English speakers, but he is ignoring the predecents of Mitterrand and Pompidou. He suggests that only an out-of-touch pedant would advise the Hungarian stress, but neither Mitterrand nor Pompidou had this justification for initial stress, and yet they tripped off the English tongue just fine, while MitTERRand and PomPIdou would have sounded bizarre. Names from other languages often have final syllable stress transferred to the initial syllable in English: Khrushchëv and Gorbachëv are two Russian names that immediately spring to mind.
John’s comments are prompted by Marcel Berlins’ column in yesterday’s Guardian. Mr Berlins has, as they say, ‘previous’, in complaining about the BBC Pronunciation Unit: about ten years ago, he wrote a piece in which he claimed that a member of the Unit had told him he was mispronouncing his own name. I wrote him a polite letter saying that it was most unlikely that any member of the Unit should have suggested such a thing, as policy was always to recommend the version preferred by the bearer of the name. In fact, no member of the Unit recalled having even spoken to Mr Berlins, let alone having discussed the pronunciation of his name with him. Instead of writing back to me, Mr Berlins returned to the topic in his column, and (one assumes jocularly) threatened legal action for doubting his word. As a good BBC employee, I let the matter drop at that time, but it is clear that he enjoys attacking those who cannot answer back in kind. I find it difficult to believe that any current member of the Unit could write a “snide, sniffy and defensive letter”, as he says.
Rather than just assert this to be the case through his column, he should publish the offending words, and let us see for ourselves just how unpleasant the current members of the Unit are, so that we may all know how to treat them in future. Perhaps Mr Berlins should take the trouble to visit the Unit, and meet the three highly qualified, and very personable, linguists, and develop a personal relationship with them rather than making “snide” and “sniffy” comments about them from afar.