I was always taught that the word however is either surrounded by commas, in a sentence like If you do this, however, you will get into trouble, or else it must be either the first or last word in the sentence, and whatever its position, it is an adverb. Now, even on government websites, it is used as a conjunction in the middle of a sentence, with a single comma (sometimes before it, sometimes after) which clearly (to my ears at least) does not fit the intonation. Here is an example from the Highways Agency:
Depending on the stage of works it may be necessary to maintain lane or road closures, however we will do everything possible to open lanes as soon as we can.
Obviously no one proof reads anything any more (re-write: … road closures. However, we will …)
John Wells’ blog today mentions the pronunciation of Beijing, and the BBC Pronunciation Unit’s recommendation to pronounce the -j- in the same way as in the English word ‘jingle’. He wonders how many people will heed the advice (and it’s what he gives in the Longman English Pronunciation Dictionary as well). From my experience, not many.
The New China News Agency (NCNA) decided back in the 1970s that from 1 January 1979, the only romanized spellings they would use for all Chinese names were the Pinyin ones. This meant that the capital city became Beijing, rather than whatever it might be in the various languages the NCNA put copy out in. For English-language newspapers and broadcasters, this left a problem: did they follow suit, and adopt Pinyin spellings (and so pronunciations) for all Chinese names, or did they continue to use the versions that had been current up to then, only using Pinyin for those people and places that were unfamiliar, or had no regular European spellings? Some names did not change, of course, such as the name of the Ming dynasty, but many others acquired very unfamiliar spellings: the Ching dynasty became Qing, and the early Communist leaders changed from Mao Tse Tung and Chou En Lai to Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai. Indexing became a problem as well: did you continue to look under C for the Ching dynasty, or only under Q, or should you cross reference everything, thus increasing the length of the index by a good deal?
Some publishers appeared to be completely bemused - I remember an article in the Times which used both Peking and Beijing in consecutive paragraphs. Many readers must have wondered whether the writer was talking about two different places. The BBC eventually canvassed the views of many of its journalists as to whether the”old” name, Peking, should be used, or the “new” one, Beijing. The correspondent in the Chinese capital at the time thought Peking should be maintained. No one asked me, but had they, I should have agreed with him: the words “old” and “new” were inappropriate in this context. The Chinese had not changed the name of the capital, which might have justified our changing it (as happened with Cambodia changing to Khmer Republic and then Kampuchea, before reverting to Cambodia), but had simply changed their romanization. However, his views were over-ridden, and the BBC has said Beijing ever since. Unfortunately, it has not - apart from the Radio 4 newsreaders (and not all of them!) and newsreaders on other networks (Radios 2 & 3 and World Service principally), most BBC broadcasters persist in using the palato-alveolar fricative (see my post ‘Fricative or Affricate’, and also John Maidment’s blog recently on Chinese alveolo-palatals). Notable exceptions have been every single one of the BBC’s correspondents stationed in Beijing, most recently James Reynolds. If they can learn, I see no reason why the rest of the Corporation’s staff can’t take the trouble to check with the pronunciation database and follow its advice.
I am very grateful to JJM who has answered my plea for information about what the French do with feminine nouns referring to masculine creatures (e.g. sentinelle, recrue) (see his note to “(s)he vs they”), and says that the French have less difficulty separating gender from sex than English speakers do.
Now comes the worrying part: Language Log reported last week that the French no longer agree on the genders of nouns: “Fifty-six native French speakers, asked to assign the gender of 93 masculine words, uniformly agreed on only 17 of them. Asked to assign the gender of 50 feminine words, they uniformly agreed only 1 of them”.
Does this mean that we foreigners can now ignore the problem, as we are likely to be “wrong” only as often as the native speakers?
The first dictionary definitions of essential are ‘vital’, ‘absolutely necessary’. However there is one place where we see the word every day when this is not its meaning, even if the users of the word would like us to think it is. Manufacturers of soaps, shower gels, shampoos and the like are keen to tell us when they have added “essential oils” to their products. There are alternative names for these oils: volatile oils or ethereal oils, but of course these names would not serve the ends of the manufacturers - they do not give the impression that without the oils we will die!
All that essential oils do is add a pleasant smell to the product: “essential oil - an oil present in and having the characteristic odour of a plant etc., from which it can be obtained by distillation” (Oxford English Reference Dictionary). Essential in this sense is the adjective formed from essence in its subsidiary meaning: “an extract obtained by distillation etc., especially a volatile oil; a perfume or scent, especially made from a plant or animal substance”.
Essential? I don’t think so!
Jack Windsor Lewis has brought up the subject of the letter ‘j’ and its interpretation by English speakers when it comes in non-English words. It is a problem: in the Germanic languages, plus Polish, Czech and Italian it is regularly pronounced [j] (i.e. like the English consonantal ‘y’), but in Spanish it is a voiceless velar fricative [x], while in French and Portuguese it is a voiced palato-alveolar fricative [ʒ]. Only in English, among the languages best known in English-speaking countries, does ‘j’ (and sometimes ‘g’) represent a palato-alveolar affricate [dʒ]. So, what are English speakers to do when confronted with ‘j’ in a word or name of foreign origin? Jack mentions adagio, Beijing, Gigli, raj, and Taj (Mahal). To these, I can add an even stranger one: Abidjan, the capital of Côte d’Ivoire, in which the letter combination ‘dj’ makes it quite clear that the affricate is intended. Nevertheless, BBC reporters - even those stationed in West Africa - frequently pronounce this with a fricative rather than an affricate.
In one name, where the orthography has initial G, the ‘mistake’ is to use a velar plosive instead of the affricate: Genghis Khan. The -gh- in the middle gives away the fact that we have borrowed this spelling from Italian (perhaps as far back as Marco Polo), and that therefore while the medial consonant is a velar plosive, the initial one is intended to be an affricate. Confirmation of this comes from the German spelling given in the Duden Aussprachewörterbuch: Tschingis, and the names of various present-day Central Asians: Chingiz, although oddly, French seems to have opted for the opposite to the English mistake, and gone for two fricatives: Gengis, pronounced [ʒɛ̃ʒis] - at least according to the Larousse Dictionnaire de la prononciation. We are obviously afraid of the affricate - perhaps we know that it is rare in European languages, and assume that therefore it can’t ever be the right sound in a foreign word. But to my ears the result is not that we replace the affricate with the straight forward palato-alveolar fricative [ʒ] that occurs in pleasure [’pleʒə], which is usually lip-rounded and laminal, but with a less lip-rounded, and often apical articulation.
Has anyone else noticed this?
My post on the use of third person pronouns and the problems of sexism in language has generated quite a few comments. In fact, although we can bemoan the lack of a neutral third person singular pronoun in English, at least we can get round it by using ‘they’ and making the sentence plural. The Romance languages have it even harder: the third person plurals are also gender-specific. How do French, Spanish, Italian, etc. feminists cope with that?
In that paragraph, I used the word “gender-specific”. I meant precisely that: that the Romance language pronouns show the grammatical gender of the nouns they refer to. They do not indicate the sex of the animate beings. Or do they? What does French do when confronted with the necessity for using a pronoun for the second reference to army recruits? The French for recruit is “la recrue”, despite the fact that until fairly recently, they will all have been male. Similarly “la sentinelle”. I have read quite extensively in French, but I don’t recall ever coming across a solution to this conundrum. Any evidence will be very welcome …
John Wells’ blog has been talking about the mispronunciation of ‘chorizo’ in a TV advert, in which the ‘z’ is pronounced /ts/, as if this were an Italian (or maybe German) word rather than either /θ/ or /s/, depending on the variety of Spanish the speaker uses.
There are at least two other cases of orthographic ‘z’ being misinterpreted by English speakers. One is standard, the other rather more doubtfully acceptable. Both are Greek prefixes: schizo-, almost invariably pronounced /’skıtsou/ and piezo-, frequently heard as /’pi:tsou/, although “correctly” it ought to be /paı’i:zou/. All the current pronouncing dictionaries give many versions of the second of these, but the Oxford BBC Guide, as usual more prescriptive, allows only the pseudo-Greek version, not mentioning any of the hybrid German/Greek/English interpretations.
In today’s blog, John Wells quotes a long piece by Eric Armstrong, a voice, speech and dialect coach. I have no complaint with any of the content of what he says, but towards the end, the pronoun he invariably uses for “actor” is “she”, “her”: “But silliness has great value to an actor! It frees her up, lets her connect to those new sounds in a joyous, unfettered manner, stripping away all those value judgments of sounds (and ultimately symbols) as being “mere math”. And once she can hear those sounds in her own mouth, to feel the physical action required, the visualize the action of her articulators, she is ready to begin to learn how to write them down systematically with IPA.”
Am I the only person who finds this pandering to the extremist feminist lobby offensive? The English language has no neutral pronoun for the third person singular, either as subject or object, but to use “she” and “her” in this way brings me up short every time. I am given the impression that it is only Eric’s female students who value silliness. Earlier in his piece, Eric has avoided the problem by keeping to the plural form. Why could he not continue? This is an increasing tendency among American writers. I do not believe it does anything to enhance the feminist cause, and simply annoys large numbers of otherwise peaceable citizens.
To quote John Wells from yesterday: “End of rant”.
The re-spelling system used in the recent BBC Oxford Guide to Pronunciation introduces some dubious practices. For instance, the short vowel (John Wells’ FOOT vowel) is represented there by UU. This is counter intuitive, especially as the GOOSE vowel is re-spelled as OO. This means that the closer vowel is represented by what is usually thought of as a more open vowel symbol. Consequently, Rushdie is re-spelt ‘ruush-di’ in the BOGP. I have used the more traditional BBC re-spelling system for non-adapted typewriters, which has ‘oo’ for the FOOT vowel, and ‘oo:’ for GOOSE. Not perfect, but at least it doesn’t contradict IPA practice. Hence ‘ROOSH-di’.
Petr Roesel asks about the history of the Pronunciation Unit, and various other questions.
The Unit had a predecessor body called the Advisory Committee on Spoken English, that was set up by the BBC’s first Director General, John Reith, in 1926 - when the C still stood for Company rather than Corporation. This committee originally had six members, including the then Poet Laureate, Robert Bridges, as Chairman, and George Bernard Shaw as Deputy Chairman. The Secretary was Arthur Lloyd James, at that time a lecturer in phonetics at the School of Oriental Studies, London University, but later to become the Professor of Phonetics there. Daniel Jones, the Professor of Phonetics at University college, London, and author of the English Pronouncing Dictionary, was also a member. The initial job of the committee was to make recommendations to announcers on the pronunciation of words that presented them with some difficulty - either because they were unfamiliar, or because they had two or more current pronunciations. The linguists on the committee were well aware that they were not deciding on correctness, but Bridges and Shaw, and the other non-professionals on the committee, believed that they were helping to maintain high standards in English usage. When Bridges died in 1930 (aged 86), Shaw (who was merely 74 years old) took his place as Chairman, and other luminaries were asked to join. The Committee eventually reached a figure of thirty members, and as anyone who has worked on committees knows, the greater the number of members, the smaller the amount of work completed. However, apart from the pronunciation of vocabulary words, the Committee set about discovering the pronunciations of place names and personal names, first in the British Isles, and later in the wider world. For British names in particular, this is something about which some degree on unanimity can be achieved - establish who “owns” a name (the bearer if a person, or the inhabitants if a place), and follow them. Inevitably there are a few disagreements, such as the quality of the vowel in the place Bath: long (as in the south) or short (as in the north)? In some cases, the inhabitants of a place disagree among themselves: Shrewsbury: -ew as in ’sew’, or as in ’shrew’? There are even families some of whose members pronounce the family name in one way, others in a different one. Foreign names are more problematical, as I have pointed out in other posts, since the differences between English phonology and that of the language from which the word or name is borrowed have to be accommodated in some way.
The Committee was suspended at the outbreak of the Second World War, and replaced (originally ‘for the duration’, but so far the War has apparently not ended!) by the Pronunciation Unit, staffed by two Scottish maiden ladies: G.M.(’Elizabeth’) Miller, and Elspeth Anderson (’Andy’), and a clerk. Despite an increasing workload - more radio and TV networks, more daily hours of broadcasting - this remained the entire staff until 1957, when a third linguist was appointed. I never met either Elizabeth or Andy, but their influence was still felt when I joined the Unit in 1979, when I succeeded yet another Scot, Mrs Hazel Wright, as head of the Unit, with the title Pronunciation Adviser. One of Elizabeth’s last successes was the publication by OUP of the BBC Pronouncing Dictionary of British Names (1971), and I was the editor of the second edition which came out in 1983 (paperback 1990). This is now out of print, and neither the BBC nor OUP seems interested in a third edition, which I feel is a shame, as there is no equivalent available.
I eventually persuaded my management in 1984 that we needed more staff, and a fourth linguist was appointed, but five years later, in one of the BBC’s periodic hair shirt periods of retrenchment, that post was withdrawn when one of our number resigned. From the start of my career in the Unit, I was keen to improve the technology employed, and suggested as early as 1983 that the index, by then numbering the hundreds of thousands, could be computerized, and a synthesized voice added so that our service would be available 24 hours a day. No money was forthcoming for this until the early 90s, but eventually by 2002, the index was available to every employee on the BBC desktop, complete with the audio component. I also got the official name of the Unit changed to Pronunciation Research Unit, to reflect more accurately the nature of the work we were doing.
In 2001 another round of cuts required volunteers for redundancy, and since my management had been hounding me for the last four years, I decided that enough was enough, and put my name forward. It was accepted with alacrity, and the post of Pronunciation Adviser was closed. The Unit is now managed, so far as I understand, by a non-linguist, although one of the three remaining linguists (the clerk’s post disappeared with computerization) has the title Co-ordinator. Her name is Catherine Sangster, and her CV can be found on the BBC website.
I hope this answers Petr’s questions?