Don't shay a word

For much of the past week, my Twitter timeline has been full of posts with the tag #IHDOS14. A very prolific source (thanks Sandy ) was following a talk given by Robin Walker, now available here.

My attention was first grabbed by this:



Only three? Listen to Ritula Shah (@ritula) saying 'Afghanistan'† and see if you dare say that again! Those three parts may be (? – I haven't really thought about this, but my brushes with other languages frequently leave me wondering at the phonological simplicity of English) sufficient for describing English, but many other languages use many more.

<autobiographical_note date-range="1972-3">
I have mentioned Joe Cremona  – the man chiefly responsible for what little I know of Romance Philology –  before. At our first meeting, wanting to know how much I knew about Spanish (very little at the time, deriving chiefly from a short tour of the north of Spain, partially recounted here) he asked me what the Spanish was for 'broom'. I didn't know, but I did know that the family name of the Plantagenet  kings was Broom, and that their emblem featured the plant with the Latin name of Planta Genista (whence 'Plantagenet'). So I guessed at 'genista' – which told him what he wanted to know: when pronouncing a word with the letters 'st' my s was not apical.

FYI, the word for broom is hiniesta; but the point is that in this context the sibilant is produced by a closure between the very tip of the tongue and the alveolar ridge.
</autobiographical_note>

When I saw the offending tweet I posted this:

Different languages make demands on different parts of the tongue, and in the process of acquiring our mother tongue we learn not to pay attention to (and even to become oblivious to) speech sounds that don't belong to our mother tongue's sound system. And the process of learning starts in the womb (as I mentioned here):

"The dramatic finding of this study [reported here] is that not only are human neonates capable of producing different cry melodies, but they prefer to produce those melody patterns that are typical for the ambient language they have heard during their fetal life, within the last trimester of gestation," said Kathleen Wermke of the University of Würzburg in Germany.

So I was not surprised when the next tweet  confirmed my speculation:

This is something that English-speaking teachers of Spanish often say. But /s/ and /ʃ/ (which I imagine is what /sh/ means) are not allophonic in Spanish; [ʃ] scarcely exists in Spanish. These English teachers are referring to the apical s; and the use of 'sh' points to a reason for the misapprehension. The reasoning goes something like this:

<misapprehension  commonness="5">

1. When Spanish students try to say /s/ in certain phonetic contexts, they make the wrong noise.
2. The wrong noise sounds like (there is a quite like/very like/exactly the same continuum which depends on the listener's hearing and training) the noise that we Anglophones associate with the spelling 'sh'. [The use of 'sh' concretizes the misapprehension:

<sub_misapprehension>
Anything spelt 'sh' must be 'like' the English sound /ʃ/
<sub_misapprehension>

and the concrete is quick-drying. English teachers who have been saying this for years can be hard to convince.]

3. Therefore /s/ and /ʃ/ are allophonic in Spanish.

</misapprehension>

 I summed this up in my next two tweets:

 

I don't have access to a spectrograph at the moment, or to a native speaker of Spanish, but I have an idea for a workaround‡ (more of a limparound really). Stay tuned to this frequency for an update that involves pretty pictures, but I must be getting on; that's quite enough for now.

b
 Update 2014.01.15.15.30
† PS To clarify, I'm not saying that that /s/ is apical (although it may be, my ear has lost the acuity it had in the early '70s). The point I'm making is that every phoneme in the word is more or less subtly different from its English 'equivalent' – and those quotation marks are meant to convey my hesitancy about saying that any speech sound in one language is the same as a speech sound in another language; that's why (as I said here) blanc became 'plonk' in the ears of the Tommies who first heard it.

 Update 2014.03.02.11.30
‡ PPS And here it is. I don't have convenient access to a native speaker of Castilian Spanish, so this recording is just of my voice, pronouncing the English s, the Castilian s and in between the two the English /ʃ/:

Two things leap out from this:

• The apical s used in Castilian Spanish has a higher pitch than either English consonant
• Whereas the first two fricatives here are confident and constant, the third is not at all. This is not a feature of the apical s, but it demonstrates a point I made earlier: native speakers learn to screen out foreign sounds. The frequency varies so wildly because the tip of my tongue is frantically dodging about trying to make a sound that I have learnt (but did not acquire as part of my mother tongue).

(Incidentally, I carefully specified Castilian Spanish, because there are many parts of Spain where the s is less [and sometimes not at all, I think] apical. In Andalucía for example, word-final s becomes almost inaudible: the difference between lo bueno [the principle of good] and los buenos [good people] is largely a matter of vowel length/quality in the final 'o' of each word.)

Update: 2018.04.26.12:50 – Deleted old footer.

But I'm a good guy...

So you're allowed to cheat...?

In one of the many review of the year/predictions programmes aired in the past week, Tim Harford inveighed against infographorrhoea (he didn't call it that, but I can't quote him verbatim as I can't recall the programme's details): the tendency to splatter documents with eye-catching but meaningless and/or misleading infographics. (It was very funny and right on the money; I hope it'll make it to Pick of the Week.)  Ironically, as I write a fatcat developer is being interviewed on You and Yours, trying to defend just such an infographic.

A few days ago, I saw and retweeted (from the hip – will I never learn?) this:

It's making a good point. Government priorities are wrong-headed in a way that in less socially pregnant contexts would be laughable.  Stopping tax avoidance and evasion is the LOW-HANGING FRUIT – easy wins for a Chancellor needing to save a billion or two.

But having retweeted it I began to feel a bit uncertain about its integrity. The dark blue circle looked like a pretty dodgy quarter of the red circle. And even if the dark blue circle was the right size, the
light blue £16 billion circle, which should be slightly over half the size of the £30 billion one, was barely a third of the size (if that – it's hard to tell, as the 'circle' isn't circular).

The little circles are so small that it's impossible to tell precisely what they are supposed to represent. The yellow one, which – conveniently for my schoolboy arithmetic – should be one hundredth the size of the red one, is obviously far too small.

Just for the record, I had a bash at it with Visio. My additions aren't exact, as the configurations of our two graphics tools are bound not to match:

The arithmetic may not be perfect; in particular I ignored the possibility of negative roots for radii of circles, which –  in the view of someone who, to quote my maths master, 'took the soft option of becoming a Poet rather than a Plumber' (as for Doc Lewis there were only two sorts of people in the world, Plumbers and Poets) –  wouldn't make much sense in this context (though maybe they do in black holes...?). But my new circles are a lot closer to reflecting the truth of the statistics.

They do however fall into the trap they were supposed to, of taking the largest figure as a basis for the scale for the whole diagram. There are two scales here; a decent infographic would take the largest two circles as bases for two scales, and show the other three as proportions of each. This is grist for a possible future update. But I must get on – otherwise the proofs of the hardcopy of #WVGTbook will arrive before I've got the index sorted out.

L'envoi (French for what what HR trainers call 'take-homes')

The fact that the bad guys fight dirty, using 'infographics' full of omissions and distortions, doesn't justify the good guys in doing the same. I'm pleased to add my weight to that of people looking for a fair deal for benefits claimants, but I regret retweeting an infographic that was more than just 'economical with the truth'; it was plain fallacious.

Report from the word face

I'm nearing the end of the initial trawl though the speech sounds used (in the one dictionary I'm using), ready to create an index (useful for the Kindle edition ['This phonemic sound can be represented by...', with immediate links to example words], but not for the hardcopy one [plenty of 'rhyming dictionaries' already on the market do the same job better]). The monophthongs are as given in the standard IPA 'phonemes of English' chart; well, they couldn't really not be. But the diphthongs, triphthongs, and indeed tetraphthongs  (if there is such a word) are far more numerous. I'm not sure how to present this, without muddying the waters for EFL/ESOL students...Hmm...

b

Update: 2014.01.12.17:30 – Added PS:
PS You'll notice from the footer that I have overridden the 'perhaps...?' and am working on an index. For the reasons I gave in my last para, though, I'm not sure what value it adds; so, rather than edit all the footers to make a claim that I'm still unsure about, I'm leaving it for now. (And if anyone can teach me to use pages rather than posts in Blogger – which I suspect would save me a lot of time – please feel free....)

Update: 2014.05.16.17:00 –Updated header:

---

 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 ov 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.

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 41.050 views  and 5,700 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 2,100 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.

Deck the WHAT?

 ...the boxer, perhaps... But no, this is the last of my semi-festive posts – honest. 'Tis the season for reviews of the year, lifestyle detoxing, etc – never mind being jolly.

Two weeks ago this query appeared at  UsingEnglish.com:

hello! i want to write something for my twitter bio. please help me with these sentences, which one is the most correct?

1. History nerd and gamer with a fondness for chocolate milkshake.
2. A history nerd and gamer with a fondness for chocolate milkshake.
3. A history nerd and a gamer with a fondness for chocolate milkshake.
   
   ...

One reply referred to the carol 'Deck the halls' My lip twitched, but didn't curl (out of respect for writer). But brought up, as I was, on the David Willcocks setting, I usually look daggers at any fellow chorister who makes the hall plural.

Part of the following discussion (now deleted as it was fun but not particularly illuminating) involved somebody's contention that this sort of deck was derived from decorate. Well, NO. They're related of course, being both derived from the Proto Indo European *dek-. But they both appeared in Middle English  at more or less the same time in the historical record: deck / decorate. Both early 15th century.

The first is, some would say, archaic, though the British National Corpus lists 101 cases of decked, of which the first 20 are these:

1	A0D	W_fict_prose	A	B	C	...Mother in full evening dress decked out in false pearls, her eyelashes beaded with mascara, dominating the stage in
2	A6N	W_fict_prose	A	B	C	...was amateur. A group of girls decked with medals danced. A blue-suited man sang. An old man played several airs
3	ABW	W_fict_prose	A	B	C	occasion ...caused the cottage to be decked with red, white and blue bunting. The Post Office was a great centre
4	ACK	W_fict_prose	A	B	C	...were shown round by the WEA class decked out as praetorian guards and vestal virgins. Now here's Mike with Jilly's
5	CAB	W_fict_prose	A	B	C	...her into silence. She was decked out in her Sunday best. A pink pillar-box hat was perched precariously on her
6	CDY	W_fict_prose	A	B	C	...very upright, like a wizened doll, decked out in a bright flowery overall with carpet slippers on her feet. Her hair
7	CE5	W_fict_prose	A	B	C	...equally between life and death, was decked out like the inside of a spaceship. Wires, screens, machines and consoles
8	CMP	W_fict_prose	A	B	C	...in court uniforms so decked with gold that their coats seemed like sheets of light. There were jewelled stars
9	EFW	W_fict_prose	A	B	C	... mere heap of bones decked with cinnamon whiskers, had summoned a little energy with which to pour scorn on
10	EWF	W_fict_prose	A	B	C	...for festal purpose decked With unrejoicing berries -- ghostly shapes May meet at noon-tide; Fear and trembling Hope
11	FNT	W_fict_prose	A	B	C	..in the mirror.' I look ridiculous decked out like this.' As ridiculous as my mother, she thought to herself
12	FNT	W_fict_prose	A	B	C	...Katherine and Leo waited in a living room decked in flowers and soft lights for the first guests to arrive. Katherine in a
13	FPX	W_fict_prose	A	B	C	...She entered the theme room, which was decked out to look like the great hall of a medieval castle. She was to
14	FR3	W_fict_prose	A	B	C	...scattered pustules that had decked my chin and brows for the past year had begun to mass, forming formidably
15	FR9	W_fict_prose	A	B	C	...A number of L and C supporters, decked out in the team's lime green and guava fruit colours, decided to swop
16	FU8	W_fict_prose	A	B	C	...bulk of elephants. Decked in tasselled yellow howdah cloths and ridden by straw-hatted Annamese mahouts perched
17	GWF	W_fict_prose	A	B	C	...' seeing your company so finely decked out for travelling, if you were by any chance headed the same way?
18	H84	W_fict_prose	A	B	C	...body emptied, dried out, repacked, decked out for the long night, bandaged in the finest linen with the scarab placed
19	H94	W_fict_prose	A	B	C	...the displays on a gaily decked stall, Meredith gently extracted her father's gold mask from the tissue in which
20	H9G	W_fict_prose	A	B	C	...Everything swept and everything decked for welcome # Open doors, open arms, open faces, eyes raised,
...

A few of the remaining 81 may involve fisticuffs, but all these use the word in the lavishly/garishly/demonstratively/excessively/vulgarly... decorated sense. See more here.

A version of decked that is less arguably archaic is bedecked, with only 38 hits. Which reminds me of another properly archaic word.

<biographical_note date_range="early sixties">

One short-lived New Year's resolution involved picking an obscure word and trying to drop it naturally into conversation as often as possible in the following week. (I have a feeling The Readers' Digest's 'It pays to increase your word power' may have been involved in some way.) My last word, in the second week, was bedizened. The Collins Dictionary has an unsung feature that gives usage trends:

The first of those spikes (annoyingly there's no scale) may have been MY work. (Incidentally, for some reason, while you're visiting that Collins page, you are invited to Like it... :-?)

</biographical_note> 

Right. Back to the harmless drudgery.

b

Update 2014.01.04.13:25 – Lots of ellipses in BNC data to keep it within bounds
Update 2014.01.04.20:55 – Added PS
PS I was rereading this, and noticed that  all those 20 hits were W_fict_prose. I clicked on that to find out what it meant, and was reminded that I should have warned you: BNC's links refer to my session yesterday, and are no good. I visited again today and found that they are doubly no good, because they don't tell you what W_fict_prose is.

<autobiographical_note time_span="1971-1974" theme="CU_Footlights">
I'm reminded of a sketch I wrote with Martin Gayford, now an art critic (author of Man with a Blue Scarf ... inter alia) whose literary reputation will surely survive this revelation about his juvenilia. The sketch involved a customer talking to a mechanic; but the subject of the repair was a badly-worn edition of Shakespeare: 'The cauliflower of mercy is not strained... Dear oh lor', how long is it since you had this serviced?' – sort of thing. Anyway, one line was 'I'll have to refer the footnotes, and that could take weeks.'
 <autobiographical_note>

The point of this digression (it did have one) is that  the only way to find out what W_fict_prose is is to read the BNC help (which isn't top of my list of priorities).

This category, whatever it is, accounts for more than ¼ of all occurrences of decked, and a slightly smaller proportion (8 out of 38) of all occurrences of bedecked  – which suggests that, if not archaic, the word is at least literary.

---

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

Freebies (Teaching resources: over 36,100 views  and nearly 5,000 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 1821 views/844 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.

Buying spiced pies

See? That's how you do it. Four syllables, one idea, three plosives. (I'm talking about my title.)

It (the title) is a rewritten version of  Buy a pie for the spy – an interesting post that points out some interesting stuff about plosives voiced unvoiced and aspirated but  misses a couple of tricks. The first is in the title, which in contrast to my 4/1/3 count (syllables/idea/plosives) has a count of 6/2/3 and introduces a needless arbitariness (Why should a SPY want a PIE?) and an  irrelevant specificity (Why THE spy?).

I sense, though, that the writer teaches in the Far East, so that six simple monosyllables (avoiding the tricky /st p/ cluster) do the job better. And the very arbitrariness of the spy/pie thing may make it more memorable for a student; I'm not sure. Anyway, I prefer my more elegant version.

We come now to the second missed trick – a more serious one. It is summed up in this sentence:

In IPA, the three words buy, pie and spy are represented as [baɪ], [pʰaɪ] and [spaɪ] respectively.

Let's try a rewrite of that sentence:

In IPAUsing the symbols recognized by the IPA, the three words buy, pie and spy are can be represented as [baɪ], [pʰaɪ] and [spaɪ] respectively.

The notation I (and many other EFL/ESOL teachers) prefer for teaching purposes is phonemic (what I used earlier to refer to 'the /st p/ cluster [where spiced meets pie]'). But this post doesn't begin to introduce the concept of the phoneme; well, it does use the word 'phonological' once, which is in the right ballpark. It suggests that the writer knows so much about phonetics that s/he has made a conscious decision to avoid phoneme.

I think this is a mistake, particularly as every IPA chart that I've ever seen – among those that are likely to be referred to by an EFL/ESOL student – is called something like a phonemic chart of the the sounds of English.

But the post is interesting and illuminating, and well worth a read. I will, however, make up for the lack of phonemes by republishing a passage from my #WVGTbook:

The International Phonetics Association specifies a number of symbols and diacritics that can be used to transcribe any speech sound in any natural language, to a greater or lesser degree of precision. Learning the whole system would be a huge undertaking, and is unnecessary for any practical purpose.  A precise transcription is conventionally presented within square brackets [...]; this could be used to represent how a particular speaker makes a particular utterance. It is phonetic.

Many teachers of English as a Foreign Language need to do something different. They don't need to represent how one speaker speaks; there is no one model speaker. What these teachers want to do is to model how speakers of English distinguish bad from bed, bid, bod, bud, bode, bide, bard, bawd, bead, bayed, bowed, beard... and so on. Between such words ('minimal pairs') there is a phonemic distinction in the vowel^†. The consonants on either side of the vowel are more or less the same (there are slight differences to do with the neighbouring vowel, but they are phonemically identical): phonemic script is conventionally presented between slashes – /.../ . The /b/ phoneme that begins bad, bed, bid, bod,.... etc. is distinct from the  /l/ in lad, led, lid, lead, lard,  lewd, load, lied and so on. The fact that the first consonant sound in leek and the last consonant sound in keel are phonetically distinct  does not signify; they are both representatives of the /l/ phoneme. Similarly, the consonant sounds at the onsets of keel and call are phonetically distinct, but they can both be represented by the /k/ phoneme.

Different experts have specified various different characters for a broad transcription of English. For example, I have used /e/ for the vowel in 'led'. Others prefer /ɛ/. But neither is 'right'. The sound that I, and many other teachers,  transcribe as /e/ is more open (that is, the mouth of the speaker is opened more widely) than the IPA's cardinal [e] but more close than [ɛ], and more central than either. The phonemes necessary for an unambiguous transcription of British English are generally agreed to number somewhere in the mid-forties. The system used in the  Macmillan English Dictionary is the one used by the British Council, among many other influential participants in the EFL/ESOL world. It uses as a basis the phonemes encapsulated in Adrian Underhill's phonemic chart. (Some of the examples given in this book use a different selection from the IPA; for example, Collins English Dictionary uses /ɛ/ rather than /e/. Neither is right and neither is wrong; they simply choose to use different IPA symbols to represent the same speech sound phonemically^‡.)

When a dictionary gives a phonemic transcription (as all worthwhile modern teaching/learning dictionaries do) it is not implying 'This is how to pronounce this word'. It is implying 'native speakers of standard English typically use these phonemes'. When, as on several occasions in this work, this book says 'the dictionary's transcription doesn't match the audio sample', it is not saying 'They goofed'; an actual speech event rarely matches its phonemic transcription. Indeed, when it seems to, it just means that on this occasion the phonemic characters look the same as the phonetic characters that might be used for a narrower transcription (as is usually the case in, for example, Spanish).

b – signing off for the year. My [ahem] aspiration is that you should ʰave a ... whatever, possibly buying spiced pies before the event.


Update 2013.12.31.16.35 – Added afterthought in red.
 
^†Update 2014.01.01.14:20 – Added afterthought in blue, and this PS
PS: I touched on this issue here (about halfway down).

‡Update 2014.01.01.16:30 – And another, in brown

Update 2014.01.0216:30 – Added this PPS:
PPS: We were talking about this a while ago at UsingEnglish.com, at which I brought up my accustomed example, Audrey Hepburn:

Originally Posted by yangmuye ...

I'm interesting if English speakers are able to tell the difference between aspirated and dis-aspirated p (like in Chinese), or full voiced b and dis-aspirated p (like in Spanish).

I think native English speakers may be aware of it, without giving it much (if any) thought. For example, few people would say 'Audrey Hepburn sounds foreign'. In fact, I'm not sure myself. But her Dutch-speaking background gives her voiced plosives enough aspiration* to make me wonder.

I'm sure the Hollywood executives who first hired her had no idea about her aspiration, but it probably influenced their thinking that 'the kid had something special about her'.

b

PS You're interested, though it is an interesting question.

pps Her mistake was the reverse - not aspirating initial voiceless consonants

Update 2018.02.08.18:30 – Removed old footer

Update 2018.04.04.15:30 – Added link to When Vowels Get Together ("#WVGTbook"). This book was later released in a slightly different format as Digraphs and Diphthongs (which included a partial "sound-index" – quite a neat addition, but a lot of work). As I am now working on a book that is in effect volume 2 of the When Vowels Get Together family: WVGT...with Sonorants, I have made reference  to the earlier format (which I will, in due course, re-release as WVGT...with Other Vowels.

The check[sic]'s in the post

Report from the word face

I've taken the liberty of using check to mean 'that which is to be checked' – alias 'proofs'. And they are –  in the post, that is:

The time-scales don't inspire confidence. The cheapo-cheapo service gave an Estimated Delivery Date nearly a month later than that (early Feb); I chose the 'Expedited Service': $7.99. I could have splashed out an arm and a leg on the 'Priority Service', but  it stuck in my craw

I'm not sure what the drill is when they arrive, but I suspect it may involve carrier pigeons. So I don't expect it to be  available much before the end of March. But in the meantime I can get back to the Kindle version, which will be something of a relief.

Tha'sall for now, except for this parting crossword clue (which has a suitably festive theme):

Spooner's challenge to the over-indulgent – just the thing for the following morning. (1,4,2,3,3)

b

PS That's the good news (the proofs); the bad news is that the book wasn't long-listed for the ELTons. Well, the submission was a bit of a rush, and my hopes weren't that high anyway – as V1.0 was more-or-less unchanged from the Dictionary of Vowels and their Sounds (which was shortlisted back in 2012). Paciencia, y barajar to use a quotation I used in a post in the first days of this blog.

Update 2014.01.19.16.45  – Added PPS:

PPS – OK, that's time enough. The answer is 'a hair of the dog'.

---

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

Freebies (Teaching resources:  nearly 36,000 views  and  5,000 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 1806 views/840 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.

Waiting around

<biographical_note theme="ho-ho-ho">
Last night I sang in my choir's carol service (and the ad at that link may have been superseded by next term's concert – in which case click on Past Concerts). And as usual, I regretted the line break before 'All in white...' at the end of Once in Royal David's City. In my (painfully RC) schools the line was unbending: the 'children' (the souls of the righteous) in the carol are 'crowned all in white'. In other words, they are sainted – and marked with haloes; which makes them look, from a distance, 'like stars' (Geddit?).

So when I sang carols anywhere but school, I insisted on joining the end of the penultimate line to the 'All in white', with a breath before 'shall wait around'; and found I was alone (when all my fellow singers with a schooling in the 'One True Church' had done the same). And the waiting around needn't detain us. In any case, the unfortunate vision – of juvenile delinquents hanging about on street corners – applies to both readings. The position of the breath (after 'crowned' or after 'white') affects only the colour of their hoodies. While 'wait around' is a phrasal verb in current English, it probably wasn't when the carol was written towards the end of the 19th century. I suspect the 'wait' has the sense of 'being available to serve'; and the 'around' is a simple preposition of place.

But this did not affect my enjoyment of the service, which was great fun to participate in and to listen to. And to rehearse. My favourite moment during rehearsals involved a private joke – private, that is, to people who have a bit of Latin.

We were singing an arrangement of In Dulci Jubilo that involved only half the choir singing the second verse and the other half joining in at the words Trahe me post te. As often happens when more people sing, there was a tendency to slow down. Our conductor said 'I feel as if I'm having to drag‡ you along after me.' This was my moment of private hilarity [little things...], as the words mean 'Drag me after you' (think of tractor on the one [Latin] hand and draught [animals] on the other [English].)

</biographical_note>

But my main object in writing is to 'fess up' to a few days' delay in the appearance of proofs of #WVGTbook. I spent last week proving the first law of software maintenance – the Law of Conservation of Bugs. This states that

In any development process, the fixing of one bug will generate at least one more, either by a bug in the fix itself or (more likely in these days of 'buddies', who keep an eye on this sort of thing) by exposing an underlying bug that was previously cloaked by the original bug.

In an earlier post, I rejoiced in the fact that Amazon's CreateSpace now accepts .doc files, which spared me the chore of getting to grips with Word 2010 (which supports .PDF as an output). Poor fool (or O me miserum as they used to say in Rome). I  might have guessed that the submission process still needed .PDF as an input, so their new acceptance of other formats meant that they would do the conversion behind my back.

So I submit a 'perfect' .doc file and they introduce a few dozen errors.† Then, working from their PDF file, I have to mutilate my .DOC file so as to produce something that, while looking a mess, will (one hopes) look OK after they've messed with it. So I fix a bad page-break and the fix itself causes several new mistakes further downstream. After my first submission, there were three notebook pages of errors. I fixed them, and after a second submission, there were three notebook pages of errors. I fixed them, and after a third submission, there were three notebook pages of errors. I fixed them, and after a fourth submission, there were (you've probably guessed it – I suspect you're beginning to detect a pattern here) three notebook pages of errors....  It seems to be a Sisyphean task.

I'll try once more with Word, but if that fails I'll have to find some way of producing a PDF directly. And that'll be after Christmas. Have a good one.

b


Update: 2013.12.24.17:10 – Added PS

PS Whenever I submit a new file I get an automated mail with the subject line

The automated print check for your file is complete

They tend to accumulate, in a way that is not Sisyphean but rather Augean. Having just got the innards of the book to pass muster, I've now cleared them (that is, the mails) out. There were TWENTY. Now I just have to do the cover. But later in the week. Festivities are in progress. Hokum all ye faithful! (not original, but mine.)


Update: 2013.12.27.11:00 – Added red bits for clarity (and resisted a manus joke [that's a Latin hand –  there, I did it.])

Update: 2013.12.28.14:40 –  Added link to old blog. And another one, just then.

Update: 2014.01.06.12:40 –  Added blue clarifications in last para.

Update: 2014.02.01.13:45 –  Added this aha note:

† EUREKA:

Tale from the word-face

When the proofs arrived, the first thing I noticed about them was an extra-wide line-space (leading [with an /e/] as they say in the trade, although a strip of lead is no longer involved) above and below a line with an IPA symbol in it – which was just a bit ugly when it happened once or twice on a page, but when 5 or 6 lines with IPA symbols in them come together, the extra space adds up with itself and starts to look seriously deformed. (I attempted to explain this in a phone call to @life_academic, who has enough on his plate without worrying about his father's vanity project. [And speaking of vanity, #WVGTbook is now listed with other publications credited on the BNC site.])

But yesterday I put 2 and 2 together: the extra space causes the rogue page-breaks that hampered the submission process. It seems to result from CreateSpace's conversion from WinWord. When I create the PDF file (which I can do with a trial version of Acrobat Pro that I have use of until mid-Feb.) both the line-space and the page-breaks behave sensibly.

I hope when I submit PDF the problem will disappear (although it's possible that there's some conversion process downstream of the PDF,  which I'm ignorant of). But in that case there's nothing I can sensibly do about it anyway, and I'll have to like it or lump it.

Update: 2014.03.06.12:15 –  Added this note:
‡ It's happened again - the conductor talking about us 'dragging him after him' at a linguistically appropriate place. A different conductor this time, at a choral workshop (that link works at the time of writing, but will disappear quite soon – possibly later today, as far as the workshop is concerned) that centred on a medley of songs from Victor Hugo's The Glums [OK, Les Misérables ]. And the language in question was not Latin this time, but the Italic dialect used in the libretto for Verdi's Nabucco (we were singing a few choruses from works that were rather more to my taste). The current Italian for 'drag' is dragare, but here it is traggere. The words are traggi un suono di crudo lamento – 'drags/evokes/brings with it... the sound of <whatever-you-choose-to-translate-crudo-lamento>' ; [and the singing 'translation' doesn't mention dragging or pulling of any kind, so the coincidence is more striking – to me at least].

Update: 2014.03.06.15:15 –  Added translaton of 'The Glums', and updated TES stats in footer.

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 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...?) 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 39,500  views  nearly and 5,550 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.

GoCo and chocolate teapots

With eery foresight, and at an age when infants might be expected to have no interest in government arms contracts, a baby-word of my own invention got there first. It is meaningless to discuss how it was written, because I couldn't write; it was pronounced /gɒkǝʊ/.   People writing about it to probably bored friends spelt it 'gocco'. The affricate /ʧ/ is one of the last to be acquired by the budding native speaker of British English. M. Aldridge, writing in English Today in 1991, put it like this:

To master English phonology the child must acquire many different [phonemes], and one salient characteristic of child phonology is that different phonemes are acquired at different rates. By the age of three children tend to have mastered the vowels, and certain consonants such as plosives (e.g. /p,b/) and nasals (e.g. /m,n/)^† but they may be in their seventh year before a few troublesome consonants such as the 'th' (/θ/) in 'thing' and 'ch' (/ʧ/) 'church' are acquired.

^†I've taken this quote from a secondary source that brought Aldridge's transcription into line with that used by a particular OU course. They don't say precisely how they changed it.

For me, the chief stumbling [ahem!] block was chocolate rather than church; hence gocco.

But GoCo is the latest sexy acronym for a new way of 'saving' money, which, like 'PSI' and the other kinds of fiscal snake-oil peddled by chancellors of the exchequer since time immoral [sic], probably won't work. In fact, the word 'Federal' in that document suggests to me that, in common with several other Tory policies, it was 'born in the USA'.

'Shouldn't' the first 'Go' be pronounced /gʌ/ though, as it's derived from 'government'? This is the main argument against my /gɒkǝʊ/ as a valid (and not entirely fanciful) digression; it's not /gǝʊkǝʊ/. By that standard a 'RO/RO' ferry sounds as though it should stand for the rather macabre 'Roll On/Roll Over' (rather than 'Roll-on/Roll-off').

In acronyms, vowels rarely have the sounds they had in the original words; often their new vowel sound suggests a political spin: the Go  in 'GoCo' sounds vibrant and active. Vibrancy and activeness are necessary qualities for vendors of snake-oil and for salespeople of all kinds. The Vauxhall Nova. it is said, had to be renamed for the Spanish market because no vá means 'It doesn't go'.

<health_warning>
I'm not sure I buy this one. Stress matters more than people realize, and a stressed o in the development of Spanish became 'ue'; hence the word for new – nuevo. So the marketing story smacks of Urban Myth in this case. In the case of the Pajero I'm less inclined to be sceptical. Hacerse la paja is a taboo subject (though, in the words of  'Hair', it 'can be fun').
</health_warning>

But this isn't getting the #WVGTbook proofs any nearer submission. Byee.

b

Update: 2013.12.20.09.:40 – Added this PS

PS The guest on today's Desert Island Discs has just given an example of toddler-speech that neatly confirms Aldridge's 'vowels, and certain consonants such as plosives (e.g. /p,b/) and nasals (e.g. /m,n/)'. The word was 'pandemonium' – impressively long and apparently complex, but nothing but vowels, stops, and nasals. I bet she didn't at that age appreciate the full Miltonic meaning of the word: the noise made by all demons. 

Update: 2013.12.28.22.:40 – Added this PPS

PPS It was more than a century after Donne's death that the word acquired the cacophonous meaning that the guest's father had meant when he said it loudly enough and often enough to impress itself on her memory.

Update: 2014.12.14.18.:10 – Added this P³S

PPPS Another example has occurred to me  –  but this time the word in question was not apparently complex, but simplified. I'm sure the speaker, my daughter, was much younger than that guest on Desert Island Discs. When she was a very young toddler, needing to hang on to adults' legs to move around (and of course often being stymied by inconsiderate obstacles) my daughter – mimicking the rhythm of 'scuse me but avoiding the as yet unlearnt speech sounds /sk/ and /z/ – coined the word mimi. (afterthought: 'mimicking' was strangely apt. )

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 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:  nearly 48,600 views  and nearly 6,550 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 2,400 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.