July 24, 2008
by Graham
2 Comments

Radovan Karadžić

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.

July 23, 2008
by Graham
5 Comments

Anglicizing Spanish names

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.

July 14, 2008
by Graham
5 Comments

A French “success” story

Now for something completely different.

In April, a French luxury yacht, the Ponant, with thirty crew members on board, was hijacked by pirates in the Gulf. The French government decided to pull out all the stops to mount a rescue. The BBC reported the affair rather sketchily, here, here, here, and here,  but now the full story has emerged, in Le Parisien and Le Canard Enchaîné. I’m not aware of any of this being reported in the English-language media. Here is the account from Le Canard (11 June 2008). Any inaccuracies in the translation are mine.

“L’opération a été rondement menée”, avait claironné le chef d’état major des armées aprés l’épopée du Ponant. Sarko exprimait sa “gratitude”. Morin, son ministre de la défense, ses “félicitations” aux “forces armées, qui ont fait preuve de professionnalisme et de réactivité”. Il aurait pu ajouter: et d’une grande capacité d’adaptation dans l’adversité.

“The operation was carried out promptly,” the armed forces chief of staff trumpeted after the epic events surrounding the Ponant. Sarkozy expressed his “gratitude”. Morin, his Minister for Defence, sent his “congratulations” to the “armed forces, which  have demonstrated their professionalism and ability to react”. He might have added: and a great capacity for improvisation in adversity.

Continue Reading →

July 9, 2008
by Graham
4 Comments

French linguistic politics

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?

June 18, 2008
by Graham
3 Comments

Another family name

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.

June 5, 2008
by Graham
5 Comments

More on ‘one of the only’

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.

June 3, 2008
by Graham
6 Comments

One of the only

“We offer a fast, reliable, honestly priced connection, plus we’re one of the only internet providers in the UK to donate all our profits to charity.”

This is the claim of Waitrose.com.

It’s amazing how anyone can really think that “one of” and “only” can come together in the same sentence. A moment’s thought must bring the realization that “one of” anything must be one chosen from a group which contains others, whereas “only” means quite clearly “the one and only”. So is Waitrose the only internet provider in the UK to donate all profits to charity, or is it one of the (?)few, (?)many IPs so to do?

The fact that “one of the only” is a common phrase, found everywhere, does not make it acceptable English. It is understandable in the spoken language, where we change our mind half way through many if not most of the sentences we utter, but in supposedly thoughtful written language, it should be amended to something more meaningful.

The punctuation of Waitrose’s statement is also less than perfect: there should be at least a semi-colon, if not a full stop, before the word “plus”.

May 15, 2008
by Graham
4 Comments

Spanish spelling

The Spelling Society is to hold its centenary conference at Coventry University, and ahead of this, an article in Tuesday’s Guardian quotes the Society’s Secretary, Dr John Gledhill, as saying “In other languages, like Italian and Spanish, if you learn the alphabet, you know how to spell”.

No one can doubt that learning to spell in either Italian or Spanish is easier than mastering the same task in English, but it isn’t as straightforward as Dr Gledhill claims. Take Spanish. Like English, it uses the same letter to represent more than one sound, and more than one letter for the same sound. There are also ‘silent’ letters.

C is either a voiceless velar plosive /k/ or a voiceless dental fricative /Ɵ/ (or alveolar fricative, depending on the variety of Spanish being spoken). It depends on the following letter (plosive before consonant or a, o, u; fricative before e, i), e.g. cocina (‘kitchen’) /ko’Ɵina/. The velar plosive is also written as QU (before e or i), querer (‘to like, love’) /ke’rer/; and the dental/alveolar fricative is written Z before consonant or a, o, u: razón (‘reason’) /rra’Ɵon/, bizcocho (‘biscuit’) /biƟ’kotʃo/ . That seems clear-cut, but a very few words may be written with Z even before e or i, mostly scientific or borrowed, admittedly, but including zipizape (‘row’, ‘rumpus’). There seems no reason for this not to be spelt with initial C other than the symmetry of the two halves of the word.

G is either a voiced velar plosive (or more often its voiced fricative allophone), before consonants or a, o, u; or a voiceless velar fricative /x/ before e or i. But, J is always a voiceless velar fricative, and occurs in some words before e or i: jefe (‘chief’, ‘boss’) /’xefe/, and jinete (‘horseman) /xi’nete/, to mention two reasonably common words.

H is always silent, except in the spelling -CH- which represents, as in English, a palato-alveolar affricate. So echo (‘I throw’) and hecho (‘done’) have identical pronunciations.

B and V are always interchangeable – they both represent a voiced bilabial plosive or its more frequent allophone a voiced bilabial fricative [β]

There are also problems with what is written as LL. Depending on the variety of Spanish, this can be a lateral, an approximant, a fricative or an affricate or even a plosive. In all cases apart from the lateral, it can coalesce with what is usually considered to be a semi-vowel: /j/, written either I or Y. Consequently it is not uncommon to see words misspelt here as well.

“Greengrocers’ spellings” are found in Spanish-speaking countries just as we have “greengrocers’ apostrophes” in the UK.

May 1, 2008
by Graham
1 Comment

My name

In the late 1980s and 1990s, Oxford University Press published three books of names: The Oxford Dictionary of Surnames (Patrick Hanks and Flavia Hodges, 1988); A Dictionary of First Names (Hanks and Hodges, 1990); and A Dictionary of English Place-Names (A.D.Mills, 1998). Then in 2002, OUP decided to reissue all three volumes under a single cover as The Oxford Names Companion. I am naturally disappointed that they did not include a fourth title: The BBC Pronouncing Dictionary of British Names (G.E.Pointon, 1983), as this would have nicely complemented all three.

Unfortunately, they did not take this opportunity of updating the volumes to make them consistent.

I don’t think I’m unusual in this: when I got my copy of the Companion, I looked up my own name. It’s there, in both the Surnames and the Place-Names sections, but the entries do not correspond.

Surname:

Pointon English: habitation name from a place in Lincs., so called from OE Pohhingtūn ‘settlement (OE tūn) associated with Pohha‘, a byname apparently meaning ‘Bag’ (cf. POKE). Var.: Poynton

Place-Name:

Pointon Lincs. Pochinton 1086 (DB). ‘Estate associated with a man called Pohha’. OE pers. name + –ing– + –tūn.

Poynton Ches. Povinton 1249. ‘Estate associated with a man called *Pofa’.  OE pers. name + –ing– + –tūn.

Poynton Green Shrops. Peventone 1086 (DB). ‘Estate associated with a man called *Pēofa’. OE pers. name + –ing– + –tūn.

(DB = Domesday Book; * before a name means it is not attested)

So we have three places from which the Pointons/Poyntons may take their name, not one. How can we decide which is the most likely in any particular case? University College London and the National Trust have come to our aid.

There is now a website, http://www.nationaltrustnames.org.uk/, which tracks the distribution of family names in Great Britain in 1881 and 1998.

This gives the absolute frequency of a name, and also its relative frequency (occurrences per million of the population) and ranking (where its frequency stands in relation to all other family names). There is also a map which shows the areas where the name appears most frequently. In both 1881 and 1998 there were heavy concentrations for both spellings in Staffordshire and Cheshire. Allowing for some of the south Staffordshire families having moved there from Shropshire, it seems clear that the Companion has got it wrong in stating categorically that Pointon originates in Lincolnshire – the least likely origin of the three possible ones for the vast majority of Pointons, who live in north Staffordshire and south Cheshire. Hanks and Hodges seem to have been beguiled by the spelling, which is clearly arbitrary, and to have ignored the evidence in their own research for the alternative (Poynton).

July 2020: Health warning: This post was written in 2008. Since then, the website address “Nationaltrustnames.org.uk” has changed. It now seems to belong to an organisation for online casinos.

April 24, 2008
by Graham
0 comments

Respelling

I don’t often disagree with John Wells, but I have to make an exception in the case of his blog entry for yesterday (St George’s Day 2008 – 23 April). He says:

“In the respelling systems I designed first for the Reader’s Digest Great Illustrated Dictionary (1984) and then later for the Encarta World English Dictionary (1999), with their spin-offs (pictured), I introduced the idea of making use of doubled consonant letters.”

No, he didn’t introduce this idea – the BBC has been using double consonant letters in its respelling system since the first edition of Broadcast English I: Recommendations to Announcers Regarding Certain Words of Doubtful Pronunciation (1928). The system in use by the BBC now is rather more sophisticated than that, which was devised by Arthur Lloyd James, but the principle remains the same. Here are a few examples from that first publication, with the traditional orthography in brackets:

áddults (adults), bárraazh (barrage), bássolt (basalt), bíttewmen (bitumen), éppilogg (epilogue), répplikka (replica), wésslĭan (wesleyan).

John must have been at least subconsciously aware of the BBC system – which he was presumably already familiar with from the BBC Pronouncing Dictionary of British Names, which uses what the BBC calls its Modified Spelling alongside an IPA transcription – when he started work for the Reader’s Digest.

Where I do agree with John is his initial statement that most users of dictionaries fail to read the introductory material, material that is just as important as the alphabetical entries when it comes to interpreting the editors’ intentions.