Fings ain't what vay used to fink

David Cameron, doing a Khruschev, but in Brussels (and not doing the full discalced version – he kept his shoes on, though he prodded the lectern with a comparable mixture of stage anger and impotent bluster) was reported as saying people who thought he'd pay his dues 'had got another thing coming' (that  link is to just one report, but I haven't seen  a 'think' version in any other report). I thought I'd never heard this mangling^‡ before, but I obviously had, as Google reports that it's almost 50 times as common as the original: thinK – just over 100,000 hits, but thinG – well over 5,000,000. What had spared me from an awareness of this lapse was what phonologists call assimilation (I've mentioned this before, here). In brief, /g/ and /k/ are articulated with the tongue and the teeth in the same relative positions, but /k/ is not voiced. The voiced /ŋ/ at the end of 'thing' assimilates to the unvoiced /k/ in 'coming', and my sensitivity to this vulgarism (I'm ducking and covering as I write this) is spared.

Interesting, but...*

A similar thing happens ( but without assimilation) with 'scoring off his own bat', which notches up only 45,000-odd Google hits, as against nearly 300,000,000 for the meaningless 'off his own  back'.

<digression theme= "that is to say...">
...well, not assimilatiom to another phoneme. I think it was John Trim (mentioned elsewhere in this blog: let the word-cloud do its thing if you're interested)  who pointed out that a speaker's  simply closing his/her mouth at the end of an utterance could make a final consonant 'assimilate' to the appropriate bilabial phoneme, so that both 'off his own bat', and 'off his own back' might sometimes sound as though the speaker  were saying 'off his own bap' (which would be no less meaningless than 'off his own back'.)
</digression> 

A cricketer scores 'off his own bat' when he hits a scoring ball –  it is not an 'extra' (added to his score in various circumstances). The expression can also be used when a tail-ender, while scoring very few 'off his own bat', plays a crucial role by supporting a batsman in a valuable partnership.

But I've heard people who should know better (regular club cricketers) say 'off his own back'. Perhaps that seemingly fanciful 'off his own bap' sound really is relevant: people hear 'bap' and supply a noun that suggests effort and support...?

Yet another such cuckoo-like displacement has happened – but with more reason – to the archaic 'for aught I know', which racks up less than 3,000,000 Google hits as against 'for all I know's nearly 90,000,000. But in this instance the change has unarguably happened. What's more, the all version makes sense.
I mentioned this before, in a note in When Vowels Get Together V5.2, referring to

(... the less common words aught and fraught – not included in the main /ɔ:/ section, as even the most advanced student is unlikely to need these. They might very occasionally meet them, but chiefly in the idioms 'for aught I know' and 'fraught with difficulty/problems/danger...'. Even then, in the first of these the archaic 'aught' – meaning 'anything' – is often replaced by 'all'; the British National Corpus lists 55 instances of  'for all I know', but only 2 for the earlier form.)

<digression theme="Word and Yosser Hughes"^†>
In fact the words 'not included in the main /ɔ:/ section' are wrong there. I need to fix it. But good old reliable WinWord has prevented me from making a quick fix. The sources are in .epub format, and Sigil (the tool that I use to edit them)  is not installed at the moment. What seems to have happened is that WinWord has taken advantage of Sigil's absence, shouldered its way to the front (of  the metaphorical crowd of onlookers scratching their heads at the sight of this exotic filetype) and said 'Ah, .epub, I can  handle that. Just leave it to me.' And messed it up royally. I shall have to restore from backup.
</digression>

Here though, shunning Google, I used the much smaller but in some ways more authoritative corpus BNC. Google is hugely bigger, but has no quality control and very low criteria for inclusion; sometimes garbage in leads to garbage out.

Time to go.

b

^† A pretty obscure one, this. This should put you on the right track.

Update 2014.10.27.09:50  –  Added PS
^‡ PS
Do I have to add a rider about 'mistakes'? Here is one one of the many accounts I have given of how language develops by the anointing of what was originally a mistake. It's just that I'm not going to reach for the ointment [to do the anointing] before anyone else.

Update 2014.10.28.10:05   –  Added PPS (tweaked in further update, 2014.10.29.16:00)

* Some of you may have noticed that this analysis slides uneasily between /g/ and /ŋ/, and doesn't work unless the speaker comes from Bradford and says /θɪŋg/. There is an issue here that people who didn't learn English as a Foreign Language are unlikely to have noticed. For a German student once (she was bothered by her jung/junger as compared with our 'young/younger') I compiled a list (by no means complete) of '-nge' spellings. I'm thinking about  this, but time doesn't allow at the moment. Here, to be going on with. is that list (the first hanger  looks like a typo. but life's too short...):

/ŋǝ/	/ŋgǝ/	/nʤǝ/
	anger
		arrange
[bang =>] banger
[bring =>] bringer
		change
[clang =>] clanger
	conger (eel)
		danger
	finger
		flange
		ginger
[hang =>] hanger
	hunger
	linger
[long…	…but] longer
		mange (connected with…
		…) manger (…but very remotely)
		[plunge =>] plunger
		[range =>] ranger
[sing =>] singer
[sling =>] slinger (rarely used on its own, but in various composite words. e.g. “mud-slinger”, “gun-slinger”)
		[strange =>] stranger
	Tonga
[wing =>] winger
[young…	…but] younger

Update 2015.09.25.11:05   –  Added PPPS

PPPS As this issue has been resurrected at the UsingEnglish forum, I've had another – possibly relevant  – thought: think is rarely (if ever [ignoring the expression have a think]) a countable noun. Hearing 'another think coming' the temptation is to parse the object as a countable noun – which makes thing a good candidate.

---

 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 47,100 views  and wellover 6,300 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.

It's easy enough for YOU to say that

A while ago, I lazily left it to a Wikipedia link to explain my use of a $10 word here: it was epenthetic.

<autobiographical_note date_range="2006" theme="word-initial consonant clusters">
During a practice lesson I gave during my CELTA training, with a polyglot class of learners one of whom was a Pole, I told my guinea-pigs, when we were working on a text that included the word 'zloty' (to my private shame, though my academic knowledge of phonology was greater than my trainer's – and he either didn't notice or overlooked it) that the consonant cluster /zl/ 'didn't occur in English'. Of course it does: 'prize list', 'has left', 'is like', 'grizzly'^‡.[avoiding possibly contentious examples – that call for footnotes  – there are a fair few one-word examples, but they are mostly proper nouns: Breasley, Dursley, Grazeley [that's one for the Berkshire readers], Hazlitt, Isley, Paisley, Quisling, Riesling, Rizla, Tesla.... The only common noun I can think of, apart from grizzly is gosling]. What I meant was that this consonant cluster doesn't occur at the beginning of a word.
</autobiographical_note>

Word spaces are a fairly recent convention. Many of the houses at Pompeii sported a mosaic like the ones spattered higgledy-piggledy about this page (victims of Blogger's whimsical attitude to graphics). Not only were these signs designed to be understood by people who couldn't read; they were created by artisans who couldn't read:

'Bewar eof thed og'                

 

was their stentorian warning; but nobody was going to ask 'What's an og?' – there was a picture of one  – so the signs did their job.

Other such mosaics at Pompeii had the word space as one might expect:

or none at all:

<digression theme="manufactured sameness">
There are hundreds of different mosaics at Pompeii, each one – of course – unique. When, later this century, London is inundated and left to rack and ruin to be discovered by 4th millennium archaeologists, how many different 'Beware of the dog' signs will they find, I wonder... A dozen? Maybe 20...? It'd be interesting to chart civilization in terms of the metric

        'Beware of the dog' signs per unit population.

</digression>

Where was I? Oh yes, word spaces. Moving on, let's consider the beginnings of words.

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.

There is a rather better-hidden epenthetic vowel in pairs of words that derive from the same Proto-Indo-European root but came to English by different routes, one of which added this sort of vowel: state, for example, and estate. The latter arrived at 13th-century English by way of a route that included languages that need a run-up before the consonant cluster. To quote that Etymonline entry:

early 13c., "rank, standing, condition," from Anglo-French astat, Old French estat "state, position, condition, health, status, legal estate"...

So far so good. But Modern French complicates the issue by hiding the 's' behind an acute accent:

...(Modern French état), from Latin status "state or condition," from PIE root *sta- "to stand"

Meanwhile, in Spanish for example, we see estado. There's an /s/ there all right., unlike French – which has no /s/ in the word as spoken, just its vestige when it's written down.

About that 'vestige' I have a madcap theory about the divine right of kings. But it has nothing to do with epenthetic vowels and I have things to be getting on with. So it'll have to wait for an update.

b
PS
In the event I made it a separate post.

Update: 2014.06.03.17:45 – Added this note:

^† I knew I had a reason for mentioning word-breaks, though the casual reader might have wondered what I was on. My point was that, for the King, /p/ at the beginning of a word was a problem. Adding an extra run-up syllable solved that problem by inventing a new word: /maɪəpi:pəl/.

Update: 2014.06.04.11:10 – Added this note:
^‡ And I don't think this word has a syllabic L (such as occurs in words like 'drizzle', which isn't /drɪzəl/ [except if you're listening to The Goon Show – Bluebottle would say /drɪzəl/

<autobiographical_note date_range="1972-1973" theme="The Goon Show>
John Trim, to whom I am indebted for my interest in phonetics, used to say 'The Goon Show may be said to be no more than applied secondary articulation.'
 </autobiographical_note>

 ]. A fractious infant is /grɪzĮi:/ [that's the best I can do for now: the typographical tools I know about aren't very open to the idea of syllabic consonants] but a bear is a /grɪzli:/ 

Update: 2014.06.05.10:45 – Added to /zl/ examples.

Update: 2014.06.06.10:15 – And some more.

Update: 2014.06.08.15:50 – Resisted the temptation to add some more, and added PS pointing to THAT theory.

Update: 2018.03.27.12:05 –  Lots of reformatting/replacing pictures that had got corrupted/clarifying text.

A horse of a different colour

Today's title was provided by 'amigos4', a long-term participant in the UsingEnglish forums. We were discussing hair colour, and the reference set me off on another reverie about where words come from (which I didn't indulge there, for fear of 'scaring the horses').

Horses? In David Crystal's The Stories of English he discusses (on p.  58) the word 'blank'.

In Old High German there is a form blanc, which means 'white, shining'. In Old English, blanca turns up meaning a horse, presumably white or grey in colour. In Beowulf (l. 856) we read of beornas on blancum  'warriors on steeds'. It is easy to deduce what happened. Roman soldiers or merchants in Europe encountered the word used by the Germanic peoples and borrowed it.

Those Roman soldiers or merchants spoke Vulgar Latin, and so many other languages descended  from Latin have similar words. ('Romance languages' is the accepted term, which I have been hesitant about using since an encounter I had with a young lady's father - whom I proudly told I was studying Romance Philology. He was not impressed: 'Romantic philosophy won't put bread on the table.') Anyway, apart from French blanc, there is  Catalan blanc, Italian bianco, Portuguese branco, Spanish blanco ...

But if blanc had Germanic origins, and was indirectly borrowed into French in a reference to horses, the story does not stop there. French returned the favour, sending the word to English in a rather different guise.

In English, there are several differences between /b/ and /p/ (which are articulated in the same place - using both lips [bilabially, to use the $10 word].) The most obvious one is voicing, the feature that distinguishes g from k, z from s, and so on). But there is another feature in our pronunciation of /b/. The onset is preceded by a little puff of air, confusingly known as 'aspiration'. The /p/ and /b/ in French don't; it's little things like this that make it difficult for us to speak French with a convincing accent - we often wrongly assume that their b is the same as our b.

<soapbox>
To learn to speak a foreign language, we must regress to our infancy and learn to make speech noises the way a baby does. Even infancy is a bit late; there is evidence that growing familiarity with speech sound starts in the womb. Here is just one such study).
</soapbox>

(The following explanation comes from a half-remembered 1972 lecture - given, perhaps by John Trim, perhaps by Joe Cremona [see others of my posts, the first one being this].) First World War Tommies, hearing the word blanc (used to refer to a drink of wine - which, in that part of France, was typically white), heard no aspiration after the b and heard p. When they returned home it was just 'wine', which - in 'San Ferry Ann' pronunciation - was 'plonk'. They showed little respect for its precise colour meaning, in a way strangely reminiscent of those Roman soldiers' or merchants' disregard for the original equine application - the Germanic blanc referring to 'a white or grey horse'.

The history of languages is full of such tangles, where etymological paths criss-cross, with echos and pre-echoes of common themes.

Ho hum. So many words, so little time...


b

PS * To quote from an article based on that study:

"The dramatic finding of this study 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.

 From the Science Daily article mentioned in my main text.

Update: 2018.04.06.12:30 – Deleted old footer. I've left the original "-"s in my text, where there should have been "–"s (as in the previous line), out on unaccountable feeling of nostalgia for my former, pre-&ndash; blogger .:-)