Adeus, João

The name João has been causing newsreaders and sports commentators the usual problems, because of the success of Mr Sousa at Wimbledon (as far as the last 16, but no further) and the death of the father of bossa nova, João Gilberto. Radio and TV announcers see the diphthong ão, and give up before they've started: "Well that's a completely outlandish sound, I've got no hope."

But I've said before, here (and in other words passim)

Our minds are quite accustomed to instructing our vocal equipment to make 'outlandish' sounds, phonemic in other languages – it's just that we've learnt not to hear them (as a necessary part of becoming native-speakers of English)

Elsewhere, in the same post,  I discussed an example word that I used to use in Portuguese "Beginner" classes, to introduce the sound of the  word Dão:

Take a word like downtime. Because of the way it's spelt it's hard to avoid believing that it is made up of the sounds /daʊn/ and /taɪm/. But think about what happens where the two syllables meet. The airstream is directed up and through the nose. Meanwhile the tip of the tongue is resting behind the dental ridge (where it is to form an /n/). To form the /t/ it has to start in the same position. Air pressure builds up behind that closure, and then explodes forwards as the closure is released; that's why linguists call /t/ a plosive.

But before the release, the closure isn't complete. In making the /n/ the speaker  has left a way through the nose for the 'buzzing' sound. In other words, the /aʊ/ vowel is being nasalized. Normally, when pronouncing the syllable /daʊn/, the speaker releases the /n/. When it's followed immediately by a plosive that uses the same tongue position though, the release often doesn't happen. So the /n/ in downtime isn't realized as an [n]; it's realized as the nazalization of the previous vowel.

So a native-speaker of English is accustomed to making a vocalic sound not unlike the end of João.

The opening fricative is a little more challenging for a native speaker of English, as there's no English word that begins with /ʒ/; this doesn't mean  producing it calls for  a special  skill.  It occurs medially (as we say in the trade) in words like measure. And cookery programmes like The Great British Bake-off, Masterchef etc have (increasingly over the last twenty years, I would guess)  inured English ears (and mouths) to words like jus.

<epenthetic_speculation>
In an earlier post I discussed epenthetic vowels:

In The King's Speech the Geoffrey Rush character advises the king to deal with problem consonants at the beginnings of words by taking a run up: /maɪ əpi:pəl/ for 'my people'. Languages often take a similar course with outlandish phonemes or consonant clusters at the beginnings of words. Among the signs of this are changing names of places over time. Stamboul Train could have a 21st century sequel: Istanbul Plane. That 'I' is epenthetic.

Possibly (just an idea, which you don't have take as gospel) the usage "with a jus" is the result of a speaker with an English phonological background dealing with a word with initial  /ʒ/  by adding an epenthetic vowel and coining a new word /'əʒu:/ with the /ʒ/ comfortably supported by a vowel on each side.

<I_KNOW_I_KNOW theme="wrong vowel">
(I've never heard an English chef even attempt the [y], but if you want to, pretend you're whistling and with the lips pursed like that try to say /i:/ – all right, "ee" if you must, but IPA symbols are so much clearer [and unambiguous {see this old post for a fuller explanation of my feelings about "sounds-like" transcriptions}.)
</I_KNOW_I_KNOW>

</epenthetic_speculation>

So anyway, there's little excuse for the repeated João-abuse. Start with a  /ʒ/  and then say "wow" (remembering to nasalize the diphthong – as  if you were talking about a clockwork mechanism that had wound down [and don't say the "d down" bit]).

b

PS I wrote this mostly before a break in the Somerset levels (very flat), but luckily held back from hitting the Publish button until I had the leisure to fix a couple of howlers – which may well have gone unnoticed,   but would have cost me a week's sleepless nights (before I logged in again).

Words "we" mispronounced

When, in the late-noughties (at the 2008 or 2009 Language Show) I first saw Babbel's offering my lip curled. A whois search shows that they were first thought of as early as 2000:

But Wikipedia claims that they were founded much later, in 2007:

The company was founded in August 2007 by Markus Witte and Thomas Holl.^[4][5] In January 2008, the language learning platform went online with community features as a free beta version.

And who am I to question Wikipedia ? Perhaps Messrs Write and Holt met earlier and registered the domain name in 2000, but didn't get around to monetizing their idea (if you'll pardon the verb) for another seven years.

Anyway, this lip-curling I mentioned. They were touting  a way of transcribing English using unmodified spelling...

<apologia>

Beginning of list there are many
more subjects on offer

I  may be misrepresenting them. The problem is that their web site is so constructed that it is impossible to get details of their transcription system without signing up for a course. And my interest in that is attenuated by the dropdown list of languages they offer, which starts like this: 

Whatever that may be, I'm not in the  market for it. 

</apologia>

My attention was recalled to this way of representing the sounds of English by a BBC article on the words "we" (whoever that is) mispronounced in 2018. After the main text (which I'll get to, honest) were the words Pronunciations provided by Babbel. I imagine this was meant to imply some sort of suggestion of gratefulness; but what should I be grateful for: For being confused? For being misinformed?

After the piece there was a reference to last year's words, which included the surname of EU Council President Donald Tusk (toosk). Oh yes? is that "oo" as in book or tool or blood...? I've said before that "sounds like" models of pronunciation are questionable (and I apologize for using them just now to make a point; I've heard Mr Tusk's name pronounced with all three of the pronunciations I mentioned (/ʊ/, /u:/, and /ʌ/); I suspect he pronounces it with a wholly different vowel: [y]?)

In an earlier post I ranted thus:

<rant flame="simmer">
 I have ranted about this before, somewhere  in the UsingEnglish forums, but I can't find where. So some readers may get a sense of déjà-lu – but probably not. (And I did mean -lu.) Anyway, here I go again. 

When you know your audience (and that word is crucial  –  when people can hear you) it's OK to say things like 'lear sounds like leer'. 'Sounds like' is meaningful only if there's a known sound to compare. But when you're writing – say, in an online forum – it's not so easy. What  if one of your readers has just learnt bear, pear, tear (NOT the lachrymal sort) or wear, so that the /eǝ/ sound is uppermost in their short-term memory of English sounds? You've told them that leer is pronounced  /leǝ/. 

Or suppose one of your readers mispronounces law as /lǝʊ/  –  a common enough mistake in an ESOL classroom   –  and you write that a word  'sounds like law'. Again, you've misinformed them. And I don't think that's too strong a word, at  least not in a language-teaching context.  If the teacher wants to communicate something, it's part of the job to make sure it's understood correctly. 

... </rant>

And I went on to say how easy and efficient IPA phonemic symbols are – particularly with reference to English. You can see the whole rant in its natural habitat here.

But I really must address those words "we" mispronounced in 2018. There weren't many in the BBC article, which referred to "A survey by the British Institute for Verbatim Reporters (BIVR) " but the link is just to the BIVR site, so one is none the wiser.

Entries include electronics firm Huawei (WA-way), specific (spe-SI-fik) and papoose (pa-POOSE).

OK, Huawei is a fair cop (though does "way" mean /weɪ/ or /waɪ/?).

<inline_PPPS>
And I'm not so sure about  the "WA" either. now I come to think of it. The H suggests that we may be dealing with the unvoiced bilabial frictionless continuant /ʍ/ (not unlike the sound at the beginning of "which" as heard in Edinburgh.

<autobiographical_note>
Which recalls to me a spelling test we were given in primary school by Miss O'Malley – a Scot, who expected us to distinguish between Wales and whales, not knowing (or perhaps not caring) that Received Pronunciation of British English uses /w/ for both (although some native speakers of British English do make a distinction between /ʍ/ and /w/  – as a matter of either regional pronunciation or just pure pedantry [encouraged by the Miss O'Malleys of this world].).
</autobiographical_note>

</inline_PPPS>

 But in nearly seventy years (OK, say 58 as an observer of language...

<autobiographical_note>
Really starting so young? Well yes. Before my tenth birthday, during a trip to Italy, I remember marvelling at the gratuitous mischievousness  of a language that marked a hot tap with a C.
</autobiographical_note>

...  I've never heard any native English speaker mis-stress specific. And pa-POOSE: whatever the vowel may be, does it end with /s/ or /z/?

The BBC article ends

The survey was commissioned by language learning app Babbel. [HD: Aha. Cui bono?} Their director of didactics, Miriam Plieninger, says the reason for the mispronunciations is pretty straightforward - many of the words on the list aren't English.

Gosh – wish I'd thought of that. But Babbel makes an awful lot more money than I have ever done; and Ms Plieninger ends with this unarguable point:

"If you understand what the other person meant, it's usually fine. As long as you get your message across, it's all good."

Right. Back to the land of the living.

b

PS
And here's a rather easy (but fairly neat, I think) French-based crossword clue.

• The workshop more recently Frenchified (1'7)

Update: 2019.01.19.15:20 – Fixed a bunch of typos.
Update: 2019.01.21.11:10 – Added PPS

PPS
And while we're on the subject of mispronouncing. the recent TV dramatization of Victor Hugo's The Glums (and I'll keep cracking that joke until somebody laughs [except that maybe it's not that funny..?] OK Les Misérables ) is a generous source...

<historical_phonological_change>
(The thing is, as I said once of Pizarro, one mustn't expect modern pronunciations in a period piece. I remember being told by the late Joe Cremona [philological non-pareil, mentioned from time to time in this blog] that when Louis Numéro-quelconque said "L'état c'est moi" the moi would have been pronounced [mwɛ].)
</historical_phonological_change>

.... But as the mispronunciation that irks me is a current mispronunciation in English speakers (I often hear it on The Great British Bake-off in the word mille-feuilles) I'm not sure how forgiving I should be.

The problem word is Montreuil,  whose last syllable several actors give a very English /ɔɪ/. And, in the light of the mess Javert made of  "prognathous" (I wrote about actors needing to understand the lines they learn here), I'm inclined to think the worst.

But I must go. If you read that  Pizarro, post you may have noticed (tucked away in a footnote) mention of Simon and Garfunkel, who are the subject of a jaunt I'm off on.

Update: 2019.01.24.12:35 – Added inline PPPS

Update: 2019.09.10.10:05 – Added P⁴S

P⁴S That clue: l'atelier

Veja o que fiz

That's Look what I did – and it's my way of introducing the idea  that the Brazilian magazine Veja has a title that means Look. This might go some way to extenuating the carelessness about verbs in a newspaper correction noticed by the News Quiz the other day:

"Eduardo Jorge likes to spend his time reading Tolstoy, not Toy Story as originally reported"

You don't read Toy Story.

This feature threatened the News Quiz's claims for topicality.  Pragmatismo reported the correction on 5 Oct 2014. Veja's gaffe was committed two days earlier – making the News Quiz‘s spot nearly 4 years old.

<digression>
(not that that is a bad case of déjà news – someone at the end of the same show read a report from a listener who claimed to have seen an old chestnut [the one about washing teapots and standing in the sink with bottoms in the air] that I first saw in the pre-WWW days of the Internet when bored office workers polluted the environment with pages and pages of "jokes"...

<aside>
A thousand curses be upon the inventor of Reply/All.
</aside>

...; and I've since seen many variants ["hot bottoms on the draining board", etc], all based on the same old misrelated clause gag.

The News Quiz editors really need to  exercise  some quality  control.
</digression>

But what struck me most about the slip was that it was a particularly Brazilian one. I know next to nothing about Brazilian Portuguese (which differs much further from its Old World antecedent than American English does from British English), and not  much  more about its phonology. The /l/ phoneme*, however, sticks out a mile, because of something known to students of phonetics as labialization. As the word suggests, labialization involves the lips – so that the continental Portuguese /brɐzil/ becomes the Brazilian Portuguese /brɑzilʷ/.

And "Tolstoy" becomes /tɔlʷ.../ – sorry, can't do the second syllable. In the first syllable something almost entirely (in some speakers, entirely) vocalic happens after the /t/.

Now we come to the "Toy..." (the non-English speaker's expectation of how it will sound). Learners of English as a Second Language (in this case, non-English speakers of a borrowed English word) have trouble with sounds that don't have a 1:1 correspondence with written letters. They learn that English doesn't work like that, but the written letters still intrude in the speech. In many interviews with non-English speakers, for example, you will hear "who" pronounced /wu:/.

In the English /ɔɪ/ diphthong there are not two vowels, although the transcription may seem to suggest there is. There is no /ɔ/ vowel in English in any case, but the end of the diphthong is not the equivalent of the /ɪ/ phoneme. So when a non-English speaker hears /tɔɪ/ it doesn't sound like a representation of "Toy"; that would be, in their mistaken expectation, more like /tɔ + <something>/. Maybe that <something> might be /lʷ/ (which, as I've said, can be entirely vocalic).

There are quite possibly other  languages that would predispose listeners to mistake "Tolstoy" for "Toy Story". I'm acquainted with only about 0.1% of the world's 7,000-odd natural languages, so couldn't say that Brazilian Portuguese is a uniquely favourable linguistic background for this mistake; but it's the most likely one that I've met.

Ho hum. Things to do (just less interesting things)...

b

Update: 2018.09.19.09:10 – Typo fix and added footnote

* A guitar concert I went to yesterday evening, which included pieces by Heitor Villa-Lobos, alerted me to this over-generalization; it is not the /l/ phoneme that is labialized. An /l/ in a certain  phonological context (closing a syllable, as in Brasil or Tolstoy) gets this treatment.

Update: 2020.01.05.12:45– Added PS

I've belatedly realized the importance of this: for the speaker (and for the journalist doing the interview) all the words involved – "Tolstoy", "Toy", and "Story" – were foreign.

.. and then TWO come along at the same time

In Wednesday's Book of the Week, Love of Country, a word leapt out from Madeleine Bunting's reading and stirred a – you guessed it – memory, tinged with regret.

<autobiographical_note date_range="1981–1983">
In the early '80s I worked for Macdonald and Co. (Publishers) Ltd. When the firm was swallowed up by BPPC, owned by Robert Maxwell, we moved to a large office building (a hastily converted factory, to be honest) renamed, with sublime lack of  social awareness, Maxwell House.

One of my favourite authors was the old (nay auld) Scot Finlay J Mcdonald (no relation), and the first of the three autobiographical reminiscences of his childhood on Harris was called Crowdie & Cream. I handled the photographs used in this book, one of which was very valuable (he had borrowed it from someone who ... I'm not sure, but anyway it was important to the owner)..

When I was let go (as discussed, or at least referred to, before) I had a few minutes to clear my desk, and the converted factory had no space for storage. The photo went missing, and the people left behind, failing to find the photo, did the natural thing and blamed the absentee. Although I had visited him and his wife at Twechar (then on the outskirts of Glasgow, since no doubt englouti – enGlasgowed?) and we had been on friendly terms (I remember amusing him by observing that when I telephoned the key-tones in his 10-digit number played

There was a wee cooper wha lived in Fife

) I never heard from him again. He was a fairly spry old man at the time, but is almost certainly no longer with us*. His much younger wife (a singer of Gaelic songs, [Catriona possibly]), though,  may well still be with us, and I hope she doesn't bear a grudge.
 </autobiographical_note>

The word that brought this to mind was machair, a sea-side strip of rough grass typical of the Hebrides. I had met the word in the typescript of Crowdie & Cream, and checked the spelling of course, but had never heard it spoken – /ˈmæxər/, says Collins   (though Ah hae ma doots about that first vowel).

Next on the morning's schedule was Woman's Hour, in an edition called Seven at 70. One of the seven was Liz Lochhead. Jane Garvey ( for it was she) didn't use the word, I think, in introducing the poet. but she is (or was – Wikipedia would know)  holder/occupant of the Scottish equivalent (a word that may well raise some hackles: what sort of worth are we talking about?) of  the UK's Poet Laureate. This position's name is transcribed in the many ways typical of a borrowing, one transcription (a hotly disputed, hypercorrect one) is machair. I think makar is more politically correct (some would say just CORRECT), bur this coincidence, thrown up by the aleatoric whimsy of the radio schedule, tickled my fancy.


Ho hum... yuletide ballast to be collected... In the immortal words of Tom Lehrer

Deck the hall with hunks of holly

Brother  here we go again.

b
PS And here's a clue:

• Dr Spooner's instruction to Capt. Kirk, jumper in line-out? (9)

Update: 2016.12.23.13:30 – added PPS

PPS A festive clue:

• Drumstick? Stocking-filler? (3)

Update: 2016.12.31.14:55 – Added footnote.

* This morning, by chance, I heard on the radio a programme that incorporated an interview with Finlay,  which made me wonder whether there was yet time to make my peace in person. But I soon realized that as it was on Radio 4 Extra it might well not  have been live. I've just checked: Old Year's Night was indeed recorded some 20 years after I knew him, but still 13/14 years ago.

'Local' colour again

Some years ago I wrote here about local colour, and last Saturday's Zola adaptation on Radio 4 [that takes you to iPlayer's TOUGH LUCK page, though I imagine the programme will in due course be resurrected on BBC Radio 4 Extra] re-wakened me to its importance. I noticed (with a mixture of regret and contempt) some strangely inappropriate background music: it was the thirteen waters* version of Fauré's Cantique de Jean Racine (although the extract started after the words Très-Haut, so they may not have committed that particular solecism).

It starts at about 31'30"  of that iPlayer recording, and it is the unaccountable music played at a ball in the Tuileries. I say unaccountable not because of any anachronism (although to quote Wikipedia

<niggle>
"Zola's 20 Rougon-Macquart novels are a panoramic account of the Second French Empire. They are the story of a family principally between the years 1851 and 1871" and – as  the Cantique was published in 1866  –  it was a close-run thing – the Tuileries was burnt down in 1871. [Perhaps the entertainers at the ball were singing from a proof copy...  ]) But contemporaneity is not my biggest problem.
</niggle>

I just wonder whether sacred music with an organ accompaniment was a likely accompaniment to a glittering society ball in Second Empire Paris (for a start, how would they have got the organ through the doors of the Tuileries?...Unless it was already there. But then it would have  been in what Wikipedia calls "The little-used northern wing of the palace, which contained the chapel, Galerie de la Paix, and the Salle de Spectacle [which] would be called into service only for performances, such as the Auber cantata performed the evening of Napoleon and Eugénie's civil wedding ceremony, 29 July 1853,"). Perhaps it is an ironic comment on the narrative, but I don't see how.... (unless Racine's "tout l'enfer" stood  for what was going on at the ball; nah, much too subtle).

What made the music grate so painfully, though, was that the singers were English:

 /repɒn su:r nu: lǝ fǝ dǝ tæ græsǝ pwi:sɒnte

kwǝ tu: lɒnfǝ  fwi: ǝʊ sɒn dǝ tæ vwɑr/

.../ki: læ kɒndwi:  æ lu:bli: dǝ teɪ lwɑr/ ... 

(OK, I'm exaggerating a teensy bit; as with most choirs, only a few singers get it flamboyantly wrong, but those few stick out like a bear with a sore head).

What does this tell us about local colour? It had better be pretty damn good if it's to avoid breaking the spell of whatever it's supposed to be adding colour to.

b

PS A bit of an unfair clue, but quite pleasing (for me, at least):

"Bufo" for organic pest control? (8)

*This reference is explained here. When I say "it was the thirteen waters version, but they didn't sing those words" I'm not just being gratuitously contrary; it seems to me reasonable to suppose that before more egregious mispronunciations later in the piece they would have made the false liaison of très and haut.

Update: 2018.06.18.11:05 – Clarified footnote. And that answer is NEMATODE.

The 'en/dove time

Venez dans mes bras

Closer to me dear 

Donnez-vous à moi 

Set aside all fear 

Restons enlacés pour léternité 

Yes you shall be mine 

Till the end of time.

Followers of The Tunnel (who may not include me for much longer, as it is becoming decreasingly plausible – I wonder if the writers of the first series have moved on) will recognize this little piece  as the title music (written by Charlotte Gainsbourg, yes that one, though I should warn you that the article has such authoritative claims as " Her career in music influentiates a lot of artists").  A little while ago we switched over to this series from a tennis match, for which we had the sub-titles on.

Machine-generated sub-titles can be a hoot. A gem from the tennis commentary was a mangled version of "nipped it in the bud". We had just reached peak-Shakespeare, and the sub-title-o-tron (or whatever it's called) very creatively (it must have had some sort of AI) read "nicked it in the Bard" (sic, even the capital B) – evoking thoughts of Autolycus, the original "snapper-up  of unconsidered trifles" [so THAT's where he got it from]. But dealing with French was rather more dictionary-based (or perhaps that should be -biased?).

<disclaimer>
I'm sailing fairly close to the wind here, as my theoretical linguistics knowledge is Best Before End May 1974 (though bolstered a bit by later language courses). So what follows is subject to ovifacial disfigurement [="getting egg on my face" #bouBoumTsh] . But...
</disclaimer>

The voice that sings this is whispered; and the sub-title-o-tron's mistakes* led me to think about whispering. The game Chinese Whispers is almost guaranteed to work, chiefly because of the lack of voicing  – '...we're going to advance' becomes '...we're going to a dance' partly because of the inaccurate transmission of the voiced /v/. I say partly because the change is strongly influenced by the fact that 'Send reinforcements...' has been misheard as 'Send three and fourpence' (though the 'has been' there is misleading as the misinterpretation is holistic – given this unreliable string of speech sounds, what interpretation can be put on the whole  message? the hearer asks themselves). I think, though, the trigger for the misinterpretation is the /v/.

In the three lines of French  in that lyric the sub-title-o-tron made only one mistake (involving a voiced consonant), and one also in the four lines of English. The mistakes were:

Set aside your fear 

and

Restons sans laisser

Taking the French  one first, the problem consonant is the /z/ between Restons and enlacés. In this whispered voice the /z/ sounds like an /s/ . So, despite "hearing" the liaison correctly in the third line, the machine goes to its dictionary (possibly it's some kind of lexical software module, though possibly the machine hands over some queries to a human post-editor, who uses a real book) and returns  with sans laisser. I haven't met that as an idiom, and the idiomatic sans cesse suggests that the infinitive is questionable in that context – although sans can certainly be followed by a verb in the infinitive in other cases. This leaves only the unstressed vowel in [z]enlacés/sans laisser:  /a/ becomes /ɛ/  – no great surprise in an unstressed syllable

As for the English one, it doesn't depend so clearly on a voiced sound. The sonorant /l/ (which occasions this mistake) has voiced and voiceless allophones, but – as the word sonorant suggests – it's more "l-like" when it's voiced. So "all" becomes "your".

Simples [possibly].

Back to the grindstone,

b

PS Some crossword clues:

Disappeared without resistance, covered with decorative coating.  (9)

Turning effect engulfing partial success giving part of work. (8)

Update 2026.05.19.08:40 – Added PPS

* Watching the next episode the other night, I noticed that the two errors covered in this post) had been fixed. Either the subtitles are generated anew every week, or the translators' work is subjected...

<mini_rant>
And there's a difference between subject to and subjected to, which I wish writers of official notices would observe. If trains – for example – are "subject to delay" they might be delayed. If they are going to be delayed sure as eggs is eggs they will be "subjected to delays".
</mini_rant>

to some kind of scrutiny, or m-m-m-maybe I'm being w-w-w-watched....Ooer...

Update 2026.06.01.14:15 – Added PPPS

<further_reflection type="post-series" theme="ha'porth of tar">
A crucial character – multifaceted, as is the tiresome custom in these dramas [aha, she's not a baddy after all, oh yes she is, but no, err... yes, etc ad nauseam, vamp till fade] – after one of her habitual changes of face last night, being a fluent speaker of Russian, asked "Do you know what maskirovka is?" By chance, though I don't speak Russian, I did know, because last year I had heard an Analysis programme that explained this Russian-style system of deception (that was the word they used, though I'm still not sure what's special about it). 

I don't have Sky-Go, or whatever it is that lets you catch-up on Sky Living broadcasts, but I'm pretty sure the actress got it wrong. She used the word twice, and the first just put me on the Qui vive;  but I'm pretty sure whatever she said the second time matched the first and didn't begin /mask.../ (which is as much as I remembered). Shame. I wish actors would  check up on these things. My Willing Suspension of Disbelief daemon  was already working its little socks  off, without having to deal with linguistic paradoxes.
</further_reflection> 

Pinochet to transfer to Whitehart Lane?

If that crossword clue is too easy, how about this: What do Augusto  Pinochet and Louis Armstrong have in common? (This post might give you a clue.)

<thinking_time background_music="Hello Dolly">
Look, if you haven't got it yet listen to that music (the cover by Louis Armstrong):

Hello Dolly
This is Louis (/lu:wɪs/) Dolly ...

</thinking_time>

Their names are frequently subjected to hypercorrection. English commentators often give Pinochet's name as /'pɪnɒʃeɪ/, presumably assuming that there is some French background to the name (as if it should rhyme with piquet) [mistreating ,the while, the vowels and stress as only the British can]. For all I know there was considerable influence on Chile from France. While in Valparaíso {and you can make an old man very happy by giving that place-name five syllables} he studied at the French Fathers' School, and he was the son of a Breton immigrant (from Lamballe, according to Wikipedia) with a Basque mother.

But his family and countrymen pronounce the name fully hispanized: [pino'ʧɛt]

In Argentina, meanwhile, many of the influences are Italian (although France obviously figured in its history – the Falkland Islands owing their Argentine name to the French town of St Malo). So I was hoist with my own petard when Mauricio Pochettino appeared in the news earlier this week. The double T in the name marks it out as of Italian descent; double Ts are vanishingly rare  in Spanish (I'm inclined to say 'non-existent', but there may be the odd borrowed exception^†.)

Which led me to assume that he was Italian and should be pronounced with a [k]. But, not being a denizen of the sports pages, I didn't know he was from Argentina. And, like Pinochet adopting a Spanish [t] in spite of its absence in French, Pochettino adopted a Spanish [ʧ] in spite of the Italian [k].

This confirms what I have long been aware of: the [mis]pronunciation of borrowed names is one of the hardest things to learn about foreign languages.

<autobiographical_note date_range=1971>
In my youth I spent a few months selling magazine subscriptions, as mentioned in a previous post. The publishers bolstered the advertising sales of lesser-known titles by bundling them with big names. So Caza y Pesca and Blanco y Negro were thrown in when you bought a subscription to Newsweek.

One of the English titles that I had for sale was Motor Sport. So  into my fairly competent spiel (I had learned the necessary Spanish off pat) I dropped these three totally unrecognizable syllables: /məʊtəspɔ:t/. The Spanish for 'Motor Sport' included an /r/ sounded before the epenthetic vowel that precedes the outlandish^‡ consonant cluster /sp/.

<PPS>
At the 2012 Language Show I came across an interesting confirmation of this point, but from the other point-of-view. I was at a Czech taster session. It will not be news to everyone that the word robot is borrowed from Czech, specifically Karel Čapek's play RUR. It may be news, though, that – predictably – Czech nationals pronounce it wrong! I noticed this particularly because the teacher's pronunciation made it sound like my name: /'rɒbət/.
</PPS>

</autobiographical_note>

But, unseasonally late (after the late-Spring Bank Holiday, or 'Whitsun' as it's known to right-thinking God-fearers) I must go and chop wood.

b
PS Did I say the subject line's a crossword clue?


Update 2014.05.28.18:25 – Added these notes:


^† An obvious candidate is falsetto. I'd have to look that up; I know the little high twiddly notes characteristic of flamenco guitar music are called falsetas (with a single T).
^‡Outlandish, that is, at the beginning of a word. 

Update 2015.01.28.14:55 – Added (embedded) PPS.

The promised amuse-bouche

(... which has grown into a bit of a mouthful).

Some time ago I was asked at UsingEnglish.com 

Originally Posted by daisy1352

We may easily adopt and adjust them to our own patterns of language and intonation.
What is the meaning of "pattern" here?
Thanks

I thought for a while. OK, it was 7 years ago and I'm not saying I have perfect recall, but I think I'm safe in saying that it wasn't too clear what the questioner wanted. As my answer wasn't responded to in any way, I'm still not sure. But I am sure I made a mistake (marked here in red) when I answered

More or less anything! It could refer to a grammatical pattern (SVO vs SOV, for example) or a phonological one or a semantic one ... or just about any other predisposition one language can have for recognizing a regular pattern in a group of sounds. Here are a few examples:

ausgezeichnet [German, = 'excellent'] => outtasight (street talk = 'extraordinarily good') (Purely a phonological pattern; the idea of 'sight' is entirely irrelevant)

La Casa Alta (Spanish, ='the high and/or important house') => The Case is Altered - popular English pub name (a phonological origin, but with some new and irrelevant English syntax thrown in.)

And here's a very old one: the fashionable thing to have in the early Roman empire was a Greek chef. The Greek σύκωτον (with stress on the first syllable) is thought to be the reason why in Romance languages words derived from the Latin ficatum (with stress on the second syllable) have the 'Greek' stress: hígado (Spanish), fegato (Italian)... The stress-pattern is hard to distinguish in the French foie, but the 'oi' would not have been formed if the stress hadn't been on the first syllable of FICATUM.

(I've only seen the ausgezeichnet one in one published text, which I can't place right now, but it sounds likely to me.)

Here's the extract from Elcock's The Romance Languages that I had misremembered:

...FICATUM is in fact a translation  of the Greek word συκωτόν... [BK: giving us] Fr.  foie, Prov. fege, Gasc.  hidge,  Span. hígado, Ital. fégato. Possibly, in attempting to produce the oxytonic accent [BK i.e. with stress on the FINAL syllable] of the Greek word, they put a heavy secondary stress on the first syllable, which thereafter became primary. In limited areas of Romania [BK: i.e. bits of the Roman world, not NECESSARILY the country (although one of the languages given IS 'Rum.')] the modern derivatives point to the FICÁTUM which one would expect to have been the normal form, cf. southern Sard. figáu ... Rheto-Rom. (Engadine) fió, Rum. ficát.

I misremembered because I hadn't understood the mechanism described. I don't now. But it's clear from the evidence that two positions for the stress existed.

Time to go.


b

---

 Mammon When Vowels Get Together V5.2: Collection of Kindle word-lists grouping different pronunciations of vowel-pairs. Now complete (that is, it covers all vowel pairs –  but there's still stuff to be done with it; an index, perhaps...?) 

And here it is: Digraphs and Diphthongs . The (partial) index has an entry for each vowel pair that can represent each monophthong phoneme. For example AE, EA and EE are by far the most common, but there are eight other possibilities. The index uses colour to give an idea of how common a spelling is, ranging from bright red to represent the most common to pale olive green to represent the least common.

Also available at Amazon: When Vowels Get Together: The paperback.

And if you have no objection to such promiscuity, Like this.

Freebies (Teaching resources: over 40.000 views  and nearly 5,600 downloads to date**. They're very eclectic - mostly EFL and MFL, but one of the most popular is from KS4 History, dating from my PGCE, with over 2,000 views and nearly 1,000 downloads to date. So it's worth having a browse.)

** This figure includes the count of views for a single resource held in an account that I accidentally created many years ago.

---

Smile when you say-that.

Why... is there a hyphen in the middle of the title of Liam Neeson’s new movie?

When I saw this I imagined it was a joke. There's a hyphen because either the scriptwriter or some publicist put it there. To quote President Bartlet, 'What's next?'

But no, the terrier-like writer had got her teeth into this non-issue (is that a nonissue?) and was intent on worrying it to death: she devoted to it another 500-600 words. Her penultimate paragraph was a gem (or maybe an antigem):

... I would make the argument that, regardless of its international pedigree, the movie should be called Nonstop. Non-Stop’s screenwriters are three Americans, one of its headliners (Julianne Moore) is American, and the film was shot primarily in New York (according to IMDb). Universal Pictures, the film’s wealthiest production company, is of course based in the States. Surely the country that pours the most money into a movie should get to determine how that movie’s title is spelled.

More here

(Make that spenlt....?)  And in her view the  answer to that rhetorical question is so unarguable that she doesn't even grace it with a "?" Well I don't find it that unarguable, but it occurs to me that someone could usefully read The Cherry Orchard on the subject of the value of culture and the matter of just what can be bought and sold.

There were two other posts that I wanted to comment on in this connexion (and I suspect this spelling may provoke an international incident; but MY house style requires it). I can't find them though, and didn't take notes. But I must get on..... Before which:

Notes from the word-face

I have the first tranche of the index (to #WVGTbook) ready to transfer to Sigil (as part of the process described here. But there is a good deal to be done before it sees the light of day. Broadly, I am using shades/colours to show half-a-dozen degrees of commonness, and I need to set up a <STYLE> for each one. This will make changing them a breeze (it says here – #readsUserGuide). I also need to link them to the rest of the text, something that I couldn't do with HoTMetaL Pro (my WYSIWYG HTML tool of choice). So don't hold your breath, but be assured that progress is being made.

b
Update 2014.03.10.21:20 – Typo fix. Spent passed muster a few hours ago, as it's just as annoying for some readers.

Update 2014.03.11.17:20 – Found one of those posts here
and I'll say more tomorrow.

<autobiographical_note>
I was reminded by Matt Damon saying the crucial word in the Monuments Men – which is why I have other things to be getting on with.
</autobiographical_note>

Update 2014.03.12.13:55 – Found the other one too, in spirit (no link):

The croissant post ends

Fowler... says that it’s alright to acknowledge "indebtedness to the French language" through "some approach in some part of the word to the foreign sound." He means by this that English-speakers can allow themselves just a touch of Gaul: Belle-lett-ruh not belle-letters.

<rant theme="They just don't get it">
[NO NO NO  – Fowler didn't mean just that. You say it that way because the 'r' comes immediately after the 't'. To say Belle letters would just be WRONG. 'Bell letters' are things like C and G (if bells are named after musical notes)</rant>

[But I interrupted.] ...Perhaps, then, Fowler would condone kruh-san: no final T.

Although I suppose that’s an acceptable compromise, it’s one that—it must be said—doesn’t live up to New World ideals. This is America. This is a melting pot.

<rant theme="Cultural insensitivity">
[Huh. That old canard. It usually means something like 'Place where everybody coalesces into something that fits in with  MY culture.' Which reminds me of the other post I meant to write about. I still can't find it. But it was the story of a Redneck complaining at a foreign language-speaker (who had been on the phone, speaking unintelligibly): 'If you want to speak Mexican, go home to Mexico.' The reply was: 'I was speaking Navajo. If you want to speak English go home to England.'
</rant>

[There, I've done it again] ...In this country we aim to fully integrate our immigrants instead of creating a permanent alienated class. Let’s not ghettoize pastries of French origin, let’s Americanize them. We accepted the restaurant with open arms. We should give croissants the same treatment.

More here

'We' accepted restaurant with open arms in the late 18th/early 19th century. We accepted croissant a century later.

<autobiographical_note>
Until MrsK put her foot down, I used to keep old editions of dictionaries, so that I could keep an eye on usages like hyphens in composite words (like 'non-stop') and the italicization (etc) of foreign borrowings. Misleadingly for the hen, which is brown, the word 'blackbird' started life as 'black bird' and then became 'black-bird' before becoming completely agglutinated into one word.

From memory, the 5th edition of COED dropped the italicization of 'rôle' but kept the circumflex. The circumflex was an optional variant in the 6th edition. but has now disappeared without  trace. I haven't checked (but will) – and I expect to find that 'restaurant' has lost its italics but croissant hasn't yet†.

And on the subject of croissants, I think it was my late lamented mentor Joe Cremona (see this blog, passim) who attributed its invention to a Parisian patissier, in celebration of a French victory over the Ottomans. I believe some spoilsport has since disproved this story, but se non è vero, è ben trovato.
</autobiographical_note>

It takes time for foreign borrowings to assimilate. Stick around.

Update 2014.03.12.16:55 – Added afterthought in blue.

Update 2014.03.13.15:55 – Added  this note:

†The actual story is rather different. The latest edition of COED doesn't use italics to indicate the degrees of relative  naturalization of the two words. It uses IPA symbols (which I wish some other dictionaries did: what does kruh-san MEAN FFS  – apart, of course from 'You know, like all proper Americans say, duh!)? 'Restaurant' has /rɒnt/, fully anglicized, without a nasalized 'o', but with a t (not present, according to the article, in American English).  'Croissant' has the French vowel [ɔ̃] [excuse the transcription: it was either that or  'ɔ with a ~' NOW FIXED], and no t.




Update 2014.05.01.14:15 – Added  this PS to that note  (†), and updated footer:
PS I've just remembered my first introduction to the IPA in a second-year French lesson: 'ɔ with a ~' would be wrong anyway. The crucial mnemonic is sans son sang: they aren't homophones – and croissant uses the sound used in the 1st and 3rd word (not the 'ɔ with a ~ ɔ̃' proposed by COED, but ã).

Update 2014.10.10.10:35 – Added  this PPS:
PPS
In further hyphen-related news, I've just found this undeveloped stub of a blogpost, started and discarded many moons ago:

My 2011 Christmas stocking contained a DVD  that I imagine the donors will be aghast to learn had the damning endorsement 'laugh-out [sic] loud'. What can  the copy-writer have had in mind with that hyphen? Maybe it was the typesetter (if such a person exists in the world of DVD covers) enforcing, mindlessly, a house style that said 'words that combine a verb with a preposition should be hyphenated'. Perhaps a 'laugh-out', in this hypothetical person's mind, was a bit like a blow-out, but with uncontained laughter rather than food.

That's a blow-out in the Grande Bouffe sense, of course – a feast that led to ruptured guts (like a blow-out in the motor-tyre sense) would not be funny. Well, not so as to make one laugh, out-loud or otherwise.

Update 2014.10.10.11:55 –  Fix in green

Update 2016.08.11.12:55 –  Typo fix (and deleted outdated footer).

WTF

A COW HERD MAKES MORE

GREENHOUSE GAS A DAY

THAN A 3,000-MILE DRIVE

This startling snippet leapt out at me from a Times Magazine article just now. 'A single drover?' I thought, 'WTF!' – meaning, of course, 'What a Tremendous Fart'. Silly me, though, there was a word-space saving it from that hyper-flatulent meaning. But I wondered why the sub-editor had gone for that unnatural choice of words.

I looked in the text, and read this:

A herd of cows daily produces more greenhouse gas than a family car driven for 3,000 miles.

Now look back at the misleading subhead: it is in a 3-line box, with first and third lines very tight. 'A herd of cows' is three letters and a wordspace longer than 'a cow herd'. A monospace typeface such as Courier (in which an N takes up as much space as an M, and an I as much as an O, rather than the sort of proportional font that we are more accustomed to in print) accentuates this:

A herd of cows

versus  A cow herd

And if you made space for those three extra letters and one extra space by moving 'more' down to the second line, then that line'd be too full. So whether or not the medium is the message, the medium can certainly change the message in all sorts of risible (and/or calamitous) ways. I expect examples of the latter will come to me, but it's coming on to rain, and the washing's out.

(Just a quickie to let you know that work on V5.0 is under way, and V4.0 is still free to download!†)

b
Update, 20-13.09.29.18:00 – Added this PS:

And while we're on the subject of flatulence, I was dumbfounded by the ignorance and cultural insensitivity of the English-speaker from (or at least, resident in, Wales) who is reported as having said (one has to be careful – it was the Mail Online):

 'Just imagine how embarrassing it will be to have the word "fart" in your village's name .... I'd be humiliated every time I told someone my address'.

Oh dear.... The alleged speaker was not Hyacinth Bucket, but 'Sioned Jones' (who, with a Welsh-sounding name like that, should be ashamed of herself). OK, there'd be some sophomoric titters and photos of signposts, but that's par for the course when languages rub along together. It is, for example, only the most po-faced and socially insensitive English-speaking pedant who gives Immanuel Kant his native vowel; it's uncomfortably close to a taboo word.

The article 'explains' the problem:

Campaigners say the ancient name^‡ should be replaced because there is no 'V' in the Welsh language

And I'll spell out the URL, as it is a gem: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2430414/Varteg-Wales-renamed-Farteg-villagers-fear-make-butt-jokes.html#ixzz2gIbMlC56  – which invites the rejoinder 'No, it's not the making of butt-jokes they're worried about, it's fart-jokes.'

In fact, that explanation is a bit of an over-simplification. The written Welsh language has no letter 'v'. Welsh does have a voiced labio-dental fricative phoneme, to give it its $10 name; it has a /v/, and that phoneme is represented in writing as a single letter – which explains that old Ffion joke:

<political_history egg_sucker="grandmother">
Ffion was William Hague's wife, and he was PM[correction: ] party leader at the time.
</political_history>

'Why are there two 'f's in Ffion?'/ Because there's no effin' Prime Minister[correction: ] party leader' – /f/ is written 'ff'.

In short, when languages come together,  there is scope for double entendres. I'd rather live in a world with a bit of lavatory humour than in a world bereft of its minority languages.

Update 2013.09.30.09:45 - Added this PPS

And it's just occurred to me that that Ffion joke underlines my point about double entendres happening when languages meet (and if you thought I chose it because of that I'm sorry to disabuse you): here the two languages are the meta-language that addresses spelling and the informal speech that uses such defused (and so inoffensive) obscenities as "effin'".

Update 2013.10.02.15:55 – added this note:
^† Not any more

Update 2013.10.04.10:05  – added this note:
 ^‡I've only just appreciated the stupidity and insensitivity of this subhead. I might have guessed, given that it's the Mail. The 'ancient name' is 'Farteg'. A handful of centuries (maybe 6 –7 at the outside) doesn't qualify for ancientness. Farteg was called Farteg long before the Mail's Year Zero, 1066.

Update 2012.10.15.14:40  – Footer updated

---

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OU, you ARE awful

Here is a first draft of the notes for the last new V4 section:

1. borough
   There are also many place-names that are compounded from something+'borough', such as 'Marlborough', 'Middlesborough' and 'Yarborough'. (Similar-looking place-names spelt something+''burgh', such as 'Edinburgh' have no /ʌ/, and the '-burgh' suffix is not stressed: /'edɪmbrə//).
2. router
   The published (hardcopy) Macmillan English Dictionary gives three transcriptions, one for British English (with /u:/, with matching audio [on the CD]), and two for American English /u/ and /aʊ/ (but with only one audio example – /aʊ/). The Internet offering is less clear. The link with 'british/' in it has /u:/ with matching audio. But there is a mistake in the link that points to the 'american/' dictionary; there is only one transcription (/u/) with audio /aʊ/.
3. slough
   The noun has the vowel sound /aʊ/, and the wholly unrelated verb is /slʌf/. It might be thought that this word, in either of these pronunciations, is so little-used that it is not worth a student's attention, but as the Macmillan English Dictionary includes both (slough [marked 'American', and with an audio representation different from either of the transcriptions given] and slough), each of these words is included. (Students of literature may come across 'The Slough of Despond', in Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress, and students who study in the south-east of England are likely to meet the place-name 'Slough'; both of these have the /aʊ/ pronunciation.)
4. bivouac, gouache, langoustine, pirouette, and silhouette
   These five, with a shortened /u/ were borrowed (like many other /u:/ words)  from French.  Note that this is not to say that in all words borrowed from French, 'ou' makes this sound. In camouflage, carousel and limousine for example, this digraph represents an /ʊ/ sound. But in 'pouffe', an alternative spelling for pouf, the Macmillan English Dictionary gives the transcription /u:/ while the audio sample gives a clear /ʊ/ sound. (The main entry has the sound /u:/). Macmillan English Dictionary's transcription for tourniquet uses /ʊə/ in the 'ou' syllable, but the sound in the audio sample is a clear /ɔ:/. Meanwhile, the transcription of troubadour has two different phonemes – /u:/ in the first syllable and /ʊə/ in the last (although the Macmillan English Dictionary audio sample has a clear /ɔ:/ sound in the last syllable). As with all borrowings there is fluidity in (and disagreement about) the pronunciation.
   To take another example, Macmillan English Dictionary transcribes the 'ou' in boutique as /u:/, but the audio sample has something between /u/ (that is, unlengthened) and /ʊ/. The same dictionary treats bouquet in the same way (this time with the added option of an /əʊ/ pronunciation). Again, Macmillan English Dictionary transcribes the 'ou' in couscous as /u:/, but the audio sample has a clear /ʊ/ sound.
   Taking another language (the source word is Arabic, although French colonial cuisine may have influenced its adoption into English), the Macmillan English Dictionary's transcription of houmous has /ʊ/ in both syllables, but the audio sample has the sound /u:/ in the first syllable and something between /ʊ/ and/ə/ in the last. Derivation from any particular foreign language is rarely if ever a reliable indicator of the appropriate British English phoneme, although this knowledge may sometimes assist in making an informed guess. It is clear that there is a mixture of uncertainty and insouciance among native-speakers of English over how to pronounce these words , and that using a /u:/ will result in a perfectly comprehensible pronunciation.
5. chough
   This word is not listed in the Macmillan English Dictionary; the link is to the Collins Pocket English Dictionary.
6. furlough
   The rather obscure word furlough (chiefly used among British English speakers to refer to periods of absence from regular duties in the US military – the corresponding British English word being 'leave') is unique among polysyllabic words ending in '-ough' in that the last syllable, though unstressed, is pronounced with a full diphthong (/əʊ/. Other polysyllables ending in '-ough' have an unstressed /ə/.
7. bourbon
   The Macmillan English Dictionary's unequivocal transcription for bourbon uses /ɜ:/ in the 'our' syllable. This is the sound used for the US whisky. But in the context of European history, either /ɔ: or /ʊə/ is usual – as it is for a certain kind of chocolate biscuit.
8. tourniquet
   The Macmillan English Dictionary's transcription for tourniquet uses /ɔ:/ in the 'our' syllable, but the sound in the audio sample is a clear /ʊ{/. The /ɔ:/ sound, as noted elsewhere occurs (in Macmillan English Dictionary's audio sample – though not the transcription) in the last syllable of troubadour
9. could, should, and would
   The 'l' is silent in these three words. There is no trace of an /l/ phoneme (in fact, there is not even an etymological justification for the 'l' in could – Chaucer, for example, used the word 'koude' and the 'l' was added later on the basis of analogy with the other modals. See this Etymonline explanation).
10. patchouli
    While the Macmillan English Dictionary gives this vowel to the 'ou' in patchouli, with stress on the first syllable, this pronunciation is foreign to many speakers of British English, who put the stress on the 'ou' and use the sound /u:/ – giving a more English-sounding and common vowel. See, for example, here. The Macmillan English Dictionary's compiler must have been too old or too young to remember the craze for patchouli oil in the Sixties!
11. entourage
    Although entourage is clearly related to tour etymologically, the longer word has no schwa – even when a rock star takes one on tour (and who is to say whether, in some future folk etymology, an entourage may not be explained as something you go 'on tour' with!)
12. lough
    This word is used mainly in Ireland and does not fit in with a scheme of seven sounds represented by the spelling '-ough'. It does not, in fact, fit in with the standard set of 44 phonemes of British English learnt by many English language students, having the final consonant /x/, which is pronounced similarly to consonant at the end of the Scottish loch (like the consonant at the end of the Scottish loch (not unlike the one at the end of the German [bax] – Johann Sebastian et al.)
13. ratatouille
    In this word, in the Macmillan English Dictionary's entry the 'ou' digraph is realized as the glide (sometimes called a semi-vowel) /w/. Some speakers use the same /w/ sound – with the justifications of consistency, etymology, and context – for bouillabaisse and bouillon, but the Macmillan English Dictionary has a /u:/ vowel for these words.

Update 2013.09.19.17:45
I've added one for entourage.
Update 2013.09.21.17:45
And one more for ratatouille 
 Update 2013.09.21.17:35
Added this rant. The situation is ridiculous enough to merit a standalone post, but I don't have the time.

<rant flame="vigorous">
 I was recently gulled into switching to M&SEnergy; it would 'fix' energy prices until some date in the future. It doesn't. It fixes the unit cost for consumption. So if they want to raise prices they just load it onto the Standing Charge. Grrr. 'My bad'  though; I should have read the small print.

I also went for paperless billing, online management, all that good stuff. But I had trouble submitting a reading. so I pressed the button for an online chat. And this appeared: 

BUGRIT! Wrong computer. And don't talk to me about Dropbox, purveyors of flakey bloatware to the crowned houses of Europe.

Anyway, long story short, their software is incredibly picky about versions of browser software and combinations thereof with operating systems. The message was a museum exhibit, talking about Vista and Netscape. The latest version of IE it supported (not that I normally use it, but it's my first port of call when meeting ridiculous compatibility issues) was V3!†

<autobiographical_note
Internet Explorer V3, that takes me back to the time in – when was it?... the 90s? – when I was using Netscape Navigagor V2.? and I went over to the Dark Side because IE beat NN to including rudimentary CSS support. But I digress...
</autobiographical_note>

I'll have to phone. And that's Monday morning wiped out. Hmmph. And the upshot I suppose will be that I can't manage my account online because of their feebleware.
</rant>

Anyway, must get on....

b PS Here it is:

 

†I was wrong about IE V3 . Still, it's pretty picky. And people who advertise online account management should support it.

b

Update: 2013.09.26.09.50 
Footer updated

Update 2013.10.15.14:40  – Footer updated

Update 2014.11.11.11:11  – and again

---

 Mammon When Vowels Get Together V5.2: Collection of Kindle word-lists grouping different pronunciations of vowel-pairs. Now complete (that is, it covers all vowel pairs –  but there's still stuff to be done with it; an index, perhaps...?) 

And here it is: Digraphs and Diphthongs . The (partial) index has an entry for each vowel pair that can represent each monophthong phoneme. For example AE, EA and EE are by far the most common pairs of vowels used to represent the /i:/ phoneme, but there are eight other possibilities. The index uses colour to give an idea of how common a spelling is, ranging from bright red to represent the most common to pale olive green to represent the least common.

I'm thinking about doing a native iBook version in due course, but for now Mac users can use Kindle's own (free) simulator.

Also available at Amazon: When Vowels Get Together: The paperback.

And if you have no objection to such promiscuity, Like this. 

Freebies (Teaching resources:  over 47,300 views  and well over 6,350 downloads to date**. They're very eclectic - mostly EFL and MFL, but one of the most popular is from KS4 History, dating from my PGCE, with nearly 2,350 views and 1,000 downloads to date. So it's worth having a browse.)

** This figure includes the count of views for a single resource held in an account that I accidentally created many years ago.