http://www.linguism.co.uk Language in a word Wed, 28 Jul 2010 11:16:33 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en Over the last couple of weeks, the name of the tragic child James Bulger has come back into the news after nearly twenty years, because one of his killers, Jon Venables, has been found guilty of child pornography crimes. As a result, we have been hearing two pronunciations of the name ... http://www.linguism.co.uk/language/bulger Now that my far-from-expert piano playing is no longer needed for a few weeks, I've been catching up on reading the various phonetic blogs I usually follow, and have found my name mentioned a couple of times. In particular by Jack Windsor Lewis in relation to the pronunciation of names ... http://www.linguism.co.uk/language/pronunciation-mayhem Apologies for my long silence - my musical life has taken over recently (three concerts down, and another on Saturday). As I'm not a natural performer, I've had to do lots of practice, something I'm not used to! The Queen's English Society is wrong on so many points, but I have ... http://www.linguism.co.uk/language/unclear-english I've been having run-ins with the Queen's English Society since the early 1980s. Now they have raised their head again with the setting up of an English Academy, which the Society will run, and which is intended to be on a par with the French, Spanish and ... http://www.linguism.co.uk/language/the-queens-english-society My local BBC News programme yesterday included what were, for me at least, two linguistic oddities. First a wheelchair basketball player was described as being a taliswoman for the British team. This word has not yet reached the OED, and doesn't appear in the British National Corpus. Google brings up between ... http://www.linguism.co.uk/language/a-taliswoman-and-how-to-remediate In Our Time, on BBC Radio 4, continues to throw up unusual pronunciations. This morning (30 April 2010) we have had two more, both from the same speaker, who I think was Julia Lovell, Professor of Chinese History and Literature in the University of Cambridge. First, she pronounced vestige to rhyme ... http://www.linguism.co.uk/language/paradisical-vestiges I've just been listening to "In Our Time" on BBC Radio 4 (the latest one available as a podcast, 22 April 2010), and was struck yet again how inconsistent English speakers are in their treatment of Latin names. The discussion was about Roman satirists, and was between Melvyn Bragg (of ... http://www.linguism.co.uk/language/latin-and-english-again I notice that BBC Radio 4 announcers regularly pronounce Ms O'Leary's family name as /əʊˈlɛəri/. I suppose from her accent that this is what she calls herself, but I'm wondering if following suit when one does not have an Irish accent is mimicking her rather than representing her name in ... http://www.linguism.co.uk/language/olivia-oleary The main railway station in Edinburgh is named after the first of Walter Scott's novels, which he published anonymously. The pronunciation known to everyone and contradicted nowhere is /ˈweɪvərli/, but is this really what Scott intended? There are certain characters whose dialogue is rendered in a - fairly inconsistent - attempt ... http://www.linguism.co.uk/language/waverley Attending BAAP last week, I was very pleased to find there was a whole session devoted to rhythm, which I have written about before (here). One of the general conclusions was that the perception of rhythm in a language depends on the native language of the perceiver. English has a ... http://www.linguism.co.uk/language/spanish-rhythm