Anyone learning a foreign language soon becomes aware of false friends - those words that look alike in both the languages. One of the most obvious false friends in English for anyone learning it is actual. Most European languages seem to have a word that looks very much like it, but which means something different, usually ‘current’, or ‘present day’. But what about words that mean something quite different in different varieties of the same language? I’m thinking of words like alternate, that in British English means ‘every other’ - “He works on alternate days”, but in American English is an alternative word for - alternative. Many British airline passengers are disconcerted when an American pilot tells them they will be landing momentarily: they are expecting to be able to get off the plane. In British English, momentarily means ‘for a moment’, but in American English, ‘in a moment’. Warning signs on level crossings in Britain had to be changed after the authorities discovered that while has a different meaning in some parts of England. “Stop while the lights flash” was intended to mean that if the lights are flashing, stop, because a train is coming. But in some forms of English, the sign meant ’stop until the lights flash’. Does this sort of false friend have a name?
I suppose I first became properly aware of ejectives being used in English about twenty years ago, when I noticed a couple of my colleagues at work (non-linguists both) using them. I don’t know of any systematic study of their use, although a poster paper was given at BAAP in 2006, here, dealing with their use among Scottish pre-school-age children.
Daniel Jones (An Outline of English Phonetics, 9th edition, reprinted 1969) mentions ejectives only because, he says, French speakers sometimes use them when speaking English. Gimson (An Introduction to the Pronunciation of English, 2nd edition, 1970) says they occur in “Northern types of British English” (p.34). John Wells’ Accents of English, although I have not re-read it to confirm this, seems not to deal with ejectives at all - they do not figure in the index to any of the three volumes.
To my ears, ejectives, particularly [k'] are occurring with ever increasing frequency.
My impression is that they must have arisen some time ago, whenever it was that the glottal stop first started to replace the alveolar plosive. My assumption is that the progress of the sound change is as follows:
glottal reinforcement > glottal stop > ejective. The ejective arises in order to distinguish more clearly between the various plosive phonemes. It occurs mainly at the end of phrases, usually, but not always, to add emphasis to a stressed syllable.
The earliest example that I’ve heard is in the original film of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, and was used by Lionel Jeffries (1968). There are probably examples in earlier British films of the 1950s but more likely 1960s, such as The Wrong Arm of the Law, when non-RP accents started to appear spoken by genuine non-RP-speaking actors, rather than non-RP parts acted by RP-speaking actors.
It’s been very noticeable over the past week or so that almost all BBC broadcasters, from whatever department, are now saying ‘bay-jing’ for the Chinese capital. It’s been confirmed today by “a BBC employee” that a directive has been sent out by senior management that everyone must toe this line. (more…)
And finally, the vowels.
Conveniently, the traditional five vowel letters, <a, e, i, o, u> correspond to the five Castilian Spanish vowel phonemes, /a, e, i, o, u/. <Y> can also represent /i/. The two mid vowels, /e/ and /o/, have two positionally determined allophones: [e, ɛ] and [o, ɔ].
/e/ is [ɛ] adjacent to /r/ (written either <rr>, or, in initial position, <r>), before /x/, as the first element of a falling diphthong /ei/ or /eu/, and in closed syllables except before /m, n, s, θ/. Otherwise [e].
/o/ is [ɔ] adjacent to /r/, before /x/, as the first element of a falling diphthong, and in all closed syllables. Otherwise [o].
In addition, the close vowels, /i, u/ usually form diphthongs with another adjacent vowel, as [j] or [w]: Palacio [pa'laθjo] (phonemically /pa’laθio/); Huelva ['welßa] (/’uelba/). /iu/ or /ui/ are usually rising diphthongs. Exceptions occur when the /i/ or /u/ are stressed, as in Paraíso /paɾa’iso/ or El Baúl /el ba’ul/. In these cases, there will always be an acute accent above the <i> or <u>.
Any other two consecutive vowels form separate syllables, e.g. Bilbao /bil’bao/ has three syllables.
Now we come to the consonants.
Castilian Spanish is one of the few European languages to include a voiceless dental fricative /θ/ in its phoneme inventory. As this is a very common sound in English, it should present no problems whatsoever for the English speaker. Unfortunately, orthographically, it is either <c> or <z>. This leads non-Spanish-speaking native English speakers to associate it with a lisped /s/, and many will refuse to use it, on the grounds that “it sounds cissy”. Try telling a madrileño taxi driver that he sounds cissy, and see where it gets you! However, certain names seem to have beaten this: Olazábal for one. When the golfer of that name first became prominent, the mispronunciation used as an anglicization put the stress on the wrong syllable, but included the /θ/ correctly (despite the consistently correct stress in the BBC Pronunciation Unit’s recommendation from the day he hit the news, it was only when he insisted in a press conference that this was right that anyone took notice of it. So much for the influence of the Pronunciation Unit).