Jack Windsor  Lewis has sent a comment to my post on “two names and a word” which dealt with an unusual pronunciation of sedentary:

This morning, 28 Dec 09, also on Radio 4 but on Andrew Marr’s ‘Start the Week’ discussion programme, I he’rd Cambridge Professor of Neuroscience Barbara Sahakian, use the stressing ef`ficacy inste’d of the usual front stress which is the only one recorded in the three big pronouncing dictionaries and in M’Webster Online. Her speech sounds int’restingly slightly transatlantic. The Internet gives no info on her speech-formative years. I’ve no definite memory of hearing it so stressed before but I think I have he’rd the also unrecorded in`tricacy.

I don’t think I’ve ever heard ef’ficacy before, although it doesn’t surprise me (but maybe it does in someone so well educated as Professor Sahakian). Like Jack, I have heard in’tricacy. These are yet more examples of words taking on an antepenultimate stress pattern, perhaps in order to avoid three unstressed syllables in a row. They follow the pattern of con’troversy, frag’mentary, tra’jectory (which I am old-fashioned enough to still pronounce ‘trajectory – although I do split infinitives!) All these have changed, or are in the process of changing, from initial to second-syllable (= antepenultimate in these cases) stress.

John Cowan commented on my “sedentary” post that in the US, the -ary suffix of sedentary and fragmentary does not reduce to /-əri/. In the words that I was assuming it was being stressed by analogy with – elementary, complimentary, even US English reduces -ary to /-əri/, so this would not be a bar to the stress pattern changing in American accents as well. One more example among many of the conservatism of US English (that’s not meant as a criticism, by the way).

I’ve been following John Wells’ thread on nursery rhymes, and have found this rare example from a French one:

“Oui, oui, choux!” un maire y crie, “ça masse!”

Nicholas Glass, in his report for Channel 4 News yesterday on the arrest of five men charged with stealing the “Arbeit Macht Frei” sign from Auschwitz, named two other places: Gdynia and Wrocławek. He can be excused (as we are talking about Channel 4, not the BBC, here) for being unable to pronounce the second of these, which he rendered as /ˈvrɒkləvek/ (I assume that the BBC Pronunciation Unit would have recommended /vrɒtsˈwævek/), but he sounded dyslexic with his attempt at the first, which he called /ˈgɪdnɪə/. Admittedly, the unfamiliar initial cluster /gd/ is not easily managed by an untrained English speaker, but he has the example of Gdansk which has been well known for the last thirty years at least, or does he call that /ˈgædənsk/? The easiest way to deal with Gdynia is to put a schwa between the /g/ and /d/, which is what I would expect most people to do without thinking about it: /gəˈdɪnɪə/.

This morning’s Today programme on Radio 4 had a report on children’s fitness levels. The university professor responsible for it spoke of the decrease in fitness being caused by a more /səˈdentəri/ lifestyle. This pronunciation is recognised by John Wells’ LPD as “British non-RP”, but not by the other pronunciation dictionaries. Presumably it comes about by analogy with such words as elementary, complimentary, parliamentary. These words are all derived from nouns with first syllable stress, followed by two unstressed syllables. Since English tends towards alternate stressed and unstressed syllables in longer words, it is quite usual for the main stress to be shifted  to the third syllable when the suffix -ary is added. Two-syllable words do not normally show this tendency: momentary retains its first syllable stress. However, fragmentary is in the course of succumbing to the antepenultimate stress – and Wells does not even note this as “non-RP”, although he does not give it as a US pronunciation. Sedentary appears to be going the same way.

It’s often said that English has more words than any other language. I’m not aware of any bona fide linguist who’s said this, but the statement crops up in newspaper articles from time to time.

Is it true? How would you start to count? I suspect that one reason the idea has arisen is that English has the largest dictionary (at least I don’t know of a language that has a bigger dictionary than the OED), and so people make the assumption that the biggest dictionary must represent the biggest vocabulary.

English certainly has an awful lot of different words – but even then, at what point do we separate vocabulary items into different words, rather than different meanings of the same word? Flour and flower are now indubitably two words, but etymologically they both derive from Latin FLOS.

An enormous number of English words are borrowed from other languages. Is this a proof that English has more words than other languages, or is it an admission that English is so word-poor that it needs to borrow to fulfil its purpose as a means of communication?

The death has been announced of Professor Eva Sivertsen, at the age of 87. She was born in 1922 in Trondheim, Norway, and was Professor of English there from 1961, first at the then Norges Lærerhøgskole, and then, when this became part of the University of Trondheim, in the English Department there.

Her doctoral thesis was published by the University of Oslo Press with the title Cockney Phonology, and colleagues in London from that time remembered her cycling off into the East End each morning gathering data. It was said that she never went into a pub, as if this would prevent her from accessing the best sources of information, but the work was highly praised for its rigorous presentation of the dialect, using Hockett’s model of phonology.

As well as her work in phonetics and phonology, Eva Sivertsen was a tireless administrator, heading the department in Trondheim for many years, and in the 1970s she became the Rektor (the Norwegian equivalent of a British Vice-Chancellor) of the University. She also worked in the national and international fields of university and educational administration, serving on many committees.

True to her nationality, Eva was a fitness fanatic, and A.C.Gimson told the story of arriving in Trondheim by boat at 6.30 am and being met by Eva who had just run up and down a mountain, and was still wearing her tracksuit. In winter she spent as much time as she could on skis.

On a personal note, I have to thank Eva for chairing the committee which appointed me to my post in Trondheim in 1973, when I was a young phonetician part way through my research into the rhythmic structure of Spanish. The fact that I was not studying English did not bother her at all. Her confidence in my ability at that time gave me much-needed confidence, and I hope that I did not disappoint her.

There is more about Eva by John Wells and Jack Windsor Lewis