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.

(more…)

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).

(more…)

With this man’s arrest at the weekend, broadcasters are once more having to struggle with the pronunciation of his name.

The BBC recommendation, which corresponds to that given in most if not all manuals of pronunciation for Serbian, is to treat the ‘dž’, written with the single letter ‘џ’ in Cyrillic, as the straightforward English voiced palato-alveolar affricate. The final ‘ć’ ([tɕ]) is not the same as the English voiceless palato-alveolar affricate /tʃ/, but this is the nearest English sound to it - many English speakers find it very difficult to distinguish between the two Serbian sounds represented as ć and č, the latter being the [tʃ]. So the full recommendation for BBC broadcasters is /’kærədʒɪtʃ/, or in the BBC’s Modified Spelling, ‘kárrǎjitch’. Radovan doesn’t seem to present any problems at all.

However, many broadcasters are ignoring the ž completely, and saying /’kærədɪtʃ/ (‘kárrǎditch’), while the former Bishop of Oxford, Lord Harries, astonished me this morning by saying /kə’rædzɪk/ - ‘kǎrádd-zick’. He is a well-known commentator on current affairs. Does he never listen to what other people are saying?

It would help if the English-language media could be persuaded to use the necessary diacritics. With unicode fonts now readily available, there is no real excuse for not making use of them.

It ought to be easy to establish anglicized versions of Spanish names - stress is as important in Spanish as in English, and there are far fewer phonemes in Spanish than in English, so we should be able to find equivalents without too much trouble.

A major difficulty is the assumption that many British people make that they already know how to pronounce Spanish, having spent the obligatory fortnight on one of the Costas. In deciding how to treat a particular name, this leads to preconceptions having to be overcome.

Dealing with stress first, the rules for placing the stress on Spanish words are simple:

1. Words that end in a vowel, or in <n> or <s> are stressed on the penultimate syllable. <i> and <u> next to another vowel do not count as a separate syllable, whereas any combination of <a>, <e> or <o> make two syllables.

2. Words that end in any other consonant are stressed on the final syllable.

3. There are exceptions, but these are all marked by an acute accent placed above the stressed vowel. So, if you know the correct Spanish spelling, then you know where the stress comes.

This is where the problems start: English-language printed material often ignores the accents. Consequently, such triples as cántara (water jug), cantara ((s)he would sing), and cantará ((s)he will sing) become confused. In the case of names, Mérida may be stressed wrongly on the second syllable, and Jaén and Cristóbal on the first.

There is one useful rule of thumb: family names that end in <ez> are stressed on the penultimate syllable, so González, Pérez, Martínez. Jerez, a place name not a family name, is stressed on the final syllable.

The name Esteban, which by all the rules is stressed on the second syllable, is mispronounced by many English speakers who stress the first syllable, even though a little thought would make them realise that it is equivalent to Stephen or Steven.

Language Log today has an example of amazing French official duplicity, arrogance, ignorance and dishonesty.

A representative of the Académie Française claims that the minority languages of France are nothing more than debased dialects, unworthy of being recognised as languages at all, having failed to produce writers of the calibre of Balzac, Montesquieu, etc. On top of that, the European initiative to recognise minority languages is all a German plot! Germany being the only EU state to have no minority languages (is that even true?)

So Basque, Catalan, Occitan, all with long and eminent literary histories, are to be consigned to the  dustbin of history because a few narrow-minded French chauvinists (rightly is that word borrowed from French!) can’t be bothered to find out anything about them.

There are surely more Catalan speakers, for instance, than Lithuanian, Latvian or Estonians. Does the Academy not want to recognise these languages either, as being not worthy of notice? And yet they are national languages.

I think the French state feels very insecure. Inferiority complex?

My paternal grandmother’s maiden name was Winkle. Don’t laugh - this is a relatively common name in the Potteries, and presumably originates in the place name Wincle, which is a village in Cheshire. The Oxford Names Companion gives two possible etymologies of the place name: “Hill of a man called *Wineca”, or “Hill by a bend”. OE personal name + hyll, or wince + hyll.

When I started researching this part of my family history, I spent a cold afternoon in a church vestry copying out all the relevant birth marriage and death entries in the Registers, and noted that some of the entries had the spelling “Wintle”. I was interested, but not surprised, because a feature of the Potteries dialect is the merging of the consonant clusters /tl/ and /kl/ as /tl/. (It is common, for instance, to hear people talking about “pittled onions”.) I assumed, therefore, that the vicar, not being a native of the Potteries, was hearing “Wintle” and spelling the name accordingly, despite the regular local spelling being “Winkle”. I continued to collect references to the Winkle families of the district for some years, including all the entries in the censuses from 1841 to 1881. I noticed, however, that ‘my’ family appeared not to be listed before 1881, even though my great grandfather was already 45 at that time. The light began to dawn with the discovery in the 1881 census that my great grandfather was born in the Forest of Dean. Down in Gloucestershire, the name that is common is Wintle, and I now found that he had moved to the Potteries some time after 1851, when he was 15. He married, as Wintle, in 1859. He and his growing family are all listed in the censuses of 1861 and 1871 as Wintle.

My assumption about the dialectal confusion had been correct, but the wrong way round: by the time of my grandmother’s birth in 1877, the registrar had heard my great grandfather say “Wintle”, but had assumed that this was his dialectal way of saying “Winkle”, and registered my grandmother under that spelling. The whole family became “Winkle” by 1881, and when my great grandparents died, within two weeks of each other in 1924 - after 65 years of marriage, made even more remarkable by the fact that my great grandfather had been a coalminer - they were both buried as “Winkle”.

So even in an age when literacy was spreading very fast, the spelling of family names could still be affected by local dialectal considerations.

Definitions of adjectival “only” from recent dictionaries:

“alone of its or their kind; single or solitary” (Compact Oxford English Dictionary for Students)

“used to say that there is one person, thing or group in a particular situation and no others” (Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English)

“single in number; without others of the kind; without others worth considering” (The Chambers Dictionary)

What all these definitions stress is the singularity of only, whether referring to one item or a singular group. If something is already singular, you cannot then have “one of” it.

Neal gives the sentence The 100 people in this organization are the only ones who know. This is covered by the Longman definition quoted above (”one group in a particular situation and no others”) .

Maxwell suggests we replace only by solitary in Waitrose’s statement, but for me that doesn’t make any more sense. He also says that if we remove the word only, the sentence is perfect. Of course it is: it is the juxtaposition of only and one of the that I cannot accept. Make it “Waitrose is one of only five IPs …” and I have no problem, or even “… one of only a few …”, “… one of the few …”.

In Waitrose’s statement, internet providers is qualified by only, but what does only mean in this position? If it means ‘few’, then they should have written ‘few’. If it means what the dictionaries all seem to say it means, then it is being misused.

Maxwell also suggests that I may be denying the existence of idiom. Of course not, but idiom also needs to be fitted to the style or register of the language being used. In a fairly formal style like the one that Waitrose is employing, care needs to be taken that the target audience will not be able to find fault with it. Inappropriate use of language often leads to a dismissive response by the readers or listeners.

Plus is defined in the dictionaries quoted above as an “informal” conjunction, but all the examples given show it as the first word of a sentence, not preceded by a comma.