Out of the mouths of babes and ducklings

Some time ago, here,  I wrote this:

<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).

* To quote from a recent article:

"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.

</soapbox>

I've just come across a much more recent source via this NY Times article .  The immediately relevant issue (language-acquisition in the womb) is summed up here:

In the latest study, published in January in Royal Society Open Science, Jiyoun Choi, a doctoral student at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in the Netherlands... and her colleagues looked at Dutch-speaking adults, some of whom had been adopted from Korea, but none of whom spoke Korean. The researchers found that people born in Korea and adopted as babies or toddlers by Dutch families were able to learn to make Korean sounds significantly better than the Dutch-speaking controls who had been born into Dutch families.

It was especially interesting that this effect held not only for those who had been adopted after the age of 17 months, when they would have been saying some words, but also for those adopted at under 6 months. In other words, the language heard before birth and in the first months of life had affected both sound perception and sound production, even though the change of language environment happened before the children started making those sounds themselves.

This is impressive, though I'm not sure the NY Times‘s last sentence (in that excerpt) is entirely justified: "under 6  months" is not the same as "before birth"; and how could they possibly test anything to do with sound production...? (That's a rather immature question: I need to read the original paper – although the title

Early development of abstract language knowledge...

doesn't inspire confidence. The continuation does though:

...: evidence from perception–production transfer of birth-language memory

... is more  promising though.)

<autobiographical_note>
During last Saturday's Purcell concert – which, sadly, many of you missed – I was struck by two pre-echoes of our next (perhaps the little MD knows something about it, as  veterans of the original Bill and Ben series might think

<digression type="cultural background">
Bill and Ben were flower-pot-men (don't ask – it was a children's TV programme in the days when [in the UK] the BBC's Watch with Mother was more-or-less the only source of children's TV) . They caused various sorts of mild mayhem; and the narrator often finished with the words "... and I think the Little House knows something about it").
</digression>

         Where was I...? Oh yes, pre-echoes:

• The trumpets in the canzona in the overture to Come ye sons of art play a phrase remarkably similar to this tune from a very different context (J. S. Bach's St John Passion):
  

• The words "Haste, haste to town" in Dido and Aeneas, which are similar in both sense and melody to this passage::
  

</autobiographical_note>

Enough. Onward and upward: next on the agenda (perhaps that should be canenda –  from Latin cano [="I sing"]) needs work:

PS Quite incidentally (not a COincidence, it just happened), I wonder if Evan Davies in last week's The Bottom Line knew what he was doing when he produced this glorious mixed metaphor:

Is the white van your bète noire?

b


Update: 2017.03.06.18.40 – Added PPS

PPS And here‘s a clue:

• Switch prison guard‘s allegiance and increase metaphorical pressure. (4, 3, 5)

Update: 2017.03.20.16.10 – Added PPPS

PPS: On the subject of my last point, I wonder how a white-van man might become an eminence grise. Oh, and that clue: TURN THE SCREW.

Incidentally, for the benefit of anyone expecting sense from my subject lines, ... no, it's gone. There was a reason though.

Water, water everywhere

<plug object="choral concert">
Tonight – or,  by the time I hit the Submit button, last night, probably – my choir will start rehearsals for its first concert of the new term, when we'll be singing Elijah. When this was first suggested I thought I could use my secondhand copy of the score. The choir's instructions were

I think those of you who have a previous Novello version of the Elijah score may be able to use it ...

My old copy of Elijah,
alongside the 1957 programme

But as my previous edition's original sale price had been 7s. 0d. I thought I'd better use a new score. I'm quite attached to my old score though. Its previous owner, who sang with South Chiltern Choral Society, (and who I suspect was a language teacher, because he used my trick of using IPA symbols to make pronunciation notes) had kept the programme from their concert in 1957:

  Anyway, if it's as good as our our last Elijah over 10 years ago...

Elijah is a work of enormous excitement and dramatic force....The response of the chorus to their self-inflicted woes [BK not WCS's; the Israelites'] captured every nuance of their emotional turmoil and the semi-chorus sang with winsome sensitivity.)

Wokingham Times, April 2005

...it'll be a perfect way to spend a winter's evening at the Great Hall Reading.
</plug>

But what has this to do with  water (mentioned in the subject line)? Well those self-inflicted woes all stem from a drought:

...there shall not be dew nor rain these years, there shall not be dew nor rain  but according to my word.
(note cursey typeface)

Be that as it may, water – specifically water-based metaphors – has been on my mind. And drought is a good point de départ. When a source of something (there's another: a source is a spring – the watery kind ) runs low it dries up, or dwindles to a trickle. (on reflection, I suppose I could probably also have highlighted RUNS LOW; the low could refer to the level of a liquid in a container). And when a speaker loses their flow ...

<digression theme="fluency">
On the subject of flow, I am often asked – as a speaker of more than one language – if I'm "fluent in X". When you're fluent in a language words flow (without apparent reflection) from your mouth. "Am I fluent in X?" Hell, I'm not even fluent in English (although I am, as they say,  a 'native speaker'.)

<meta_digression>  

Stephen Fry, in the last edition of Fry's English Delight, distinguished between early and late bilinguals – a distinction I'm not sure about. For me, to be  bilingual a child has to be raised in a household where two languages are naturally spoken.  A man who, in later life, made a point of learning (not acquiring, to use the linguistics word for what a child does) Yiddish  (this was one of the examples given) is not, by my lights, bilingual. Maybe my lights are on the blink though. Maybe...

In my youth I was a social contact (and colleague of sorts) of Michael Portillo, erstwhile Cabinet Minister (and now sporter of multifarious jackets on a television near you). His father was Spanish. His Spanish was very good. In 1971, in Madrid, I met his cousin – who agreed; but, she added, 'habla como un libro'  ['like a book']. Maybe this wasn't original; maybe it's a traditional family description, but I give her as the source because she it was who said it to me. 

Does this make him bilingual? (Of course, he may be, depending on the linguistic environment he grew up in). 

</meta_digression>

</digression>

... their speech dries up, just as an actor may simply dry.

So much for speech; many water-related metaphors relate also to immersion (which itself is probably one... yup). If you're on uncertain ground (whoops: mixed metaphor warning) you're out of your depth; and maybe there are things going on under the surface – still waters run deep. You need to keep your head above water. And if you go against prevailing attitudes you swim against the tide; if you change your mind you row back, or in some circles (the sort where a lazy person rests on his oars, or doesn't pull his weight), you back-water ("backwater" does duty in another metaphorical sense with regard to a place where nothing much happens [oh yes, my use/non-use of hyphens is both intentional and deliberate (and if you think that's pleonastic, look 'em up)]. Or you could just go with the flow.

The word immersion itself suggests another metaphor, about language learning  – another source of watery metaphors: students acquiring vocabulary by osmosis, teachers drip-feeding information. And not just language-learning;  skills and information may leak from other disciplines. I'm sure many more such examples will come to me.

But I have other fish to fry. Before I go though, I'll share a thought I've had about bascule bridges. (That gear-change could have been smoother [via water ⇒ river ⇒ bridge], but this isn't The One Show.) Since seeing the hydraulic mechanisms that make Tower Bridge work, I no longer see it as two arms waving up and down but as a pair of asymmetrical see-saws, with their longer arms meeting, Each longer arm (half the roadway) tips up as water slooshes into the arm you can't see.

<digression theme="tai chi, nothing if not eclectic">
I use this image to reinforce the idea of weight draining from one leg into the other, so that upward movement doesn't involve muscular effort (in the rising leg).
</digression>

And where does this fit in, metaphor-wise? Well the French for see-saw (American teeter-totter) is une bascule.

b

PS: Here's a clue:
Thinker about body. (7)

Update: 2015.09.05.12:30  – Added picture, and fixed a rogue its (sorry about that,  it's not that difficult, I know, but I'm always doing it).

Update: 2015.09.14.10.55 – Added this PPS:

PPS Here's another water-based metaphor – not a current one, but still striking. Not having read Strait is the gate I don't know how – or whether – it survives translation [come to think of it, it's so striking that any translator must surely have kept it in] but La Porte Étroite includes this image. A person who has been blind from birth imagines birdsong as the sound of the environment [horrid over-functional word, but I don't have the text in front of me – the air? the world?]  boiling with joy and excitement.

Update: 2015.09.19.16.55 – Added this PPPS:

And, on  the subject of boiling, I happened on this one this morning...

<spoiler_alert>
...while doing today‘s Polygon in The Times.
</spoiler_alert>

Ebullience. As Etymonline says,

 ...from Latin ebullientem (nominative ebulliens) "a boiling, a bursting forth, overflow," present participle of "to boil over"...

More here from Etymonline .



Update: 2017.10.10.10.45 – Deleted old footer.

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.

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. )

---

 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.