Singing in tongues

A few days ago my attention was caught by this tweet:

I did what I was told, and read this post. It's a fascinating field, but I was side-tracked by a digression prompted by these words...

When copying an accent in song turns out, it is all about the vowels. “Singing is all about vowels. Language is altogether is really [HD – sic; I suspect a hasty edit {you''ll know the sort of thing if you've read some of MY stuff}] vowels interrupted by consonants. Although there are things you have to be careful of when singing consonants generally it’s the vowels you have to be careful of.” Nail the vowels and you can nail the accent...

... particularly the word consonants. When you think about it – and you may have noticed that thinking about words is something I do – it does what it says (in a way often pleasing for the etymologically minded). Vowels could be regarded as 'sonants'  (not to be confused with sonorants – which really are A Thing in the world of phonetics [and I see that my made-up word sometimes is used like that {as here}, Aw shoot ...]). My point is that vowels are things produced by the vocal cords, or – to use my attempted, but misfired, neologism – 'sonants'. Con-sonants are things that just hold them together. If you think of an utterance as a stream, the water is the vowels; the consonants are the stepping stones.

<digression> 

Recently I was watching a French drama with subtitles. A subtitle read 'Have you had one?' I tried to recapture the original from my short-term memory, but failed; in my defence, it was late evening; earlier I'd've been  listening and not reading. It might have been (though I can't guarantee it)  Tu en a eu une? Hearing and making sense of that calls for quite some linguistic skill [and, for the non-Francophone, plenty of practice with the /y/ phoneme – on which, don‘t get me started]. After the elision of en a the only two consonant phonemes among all those vowels are /n/ (twice) after the initial /t/. 

</digression>

The idea of accents in singing reminded me of a concert I sang in  nearly thirty years ago.

<autobiographical note>

Our conductor was a very young Paul Daniel. About two weeks before the concert, he started feeling a pain in his shoulder. He kept rehearsing us until the very last Thursday rehearsal, so on the Saturday we turned up for the dress rehearsal fully expecting him to be there. 

But on the Friday he had seen a specialist who told him if he conducted us the following day he might do serious damage. So, at almost no notice, we had a deputy to conduct us. The choir's records are sketchy, for so long ago. Paul Daniel was with us for 3 years (that's twelve concerts, of which he missed one), and there are records here of only 2 of his concerts. But there is also this:

Brian Wright had driven down that morning from Yorkshire. And when we sang 

Praise ye

The God of Brass 

he winced. He had been used to northern choirs, and was not expecting our /ɑ:/. I wonder what vowel Walton had in mind.

</autobiographical note>

I have long felt that the life of a choral singer would be made simpler if music publishers adopted use of the IPA. Amateur choirs don‘t have the luxury of foreign language coaches – mentioned by the opera singer interviewed in Faking the Funk::

I’ve long thought that it was easier to sing in an accent that isn’t your own than it is to speak in a foreign accent. This turns out to be somewhat true according to Bill Beeman, a sociolinguist at University of Minnesota. Beeman also happens to be an opera singer. He speaks and sings in multiple languages: English, German, Italian, French and Russian. However, his accent in each of these languages is acctually better when he sings than when he speaks.  

“My accent when I’m singing is very carefully constructed and we use coaches when we’re singing in order to be able to produce the language as perfectly as possible,” he says. 

        <autobiographical_rant>

I don't think I've ever sung Fauré's lovely Cantique de Jean Racine  [ranted about here] without a more or less protracted argument – repeated in rehearsals – about the false liaison of très with haut. And I've sung it at least a dozen times [in concerts and other performances, that is; getting on for a hundred rehearsals. On one occasion it was a tenor [who doesn't even sing the words in question] who complained: "We sang it that way [HD: the 'thirteen waters' version^PS/PPSon tour in Belgium and had no complaints." GIVE ME STRENGTH!

</autobiographical_rant>

It would make the life of a choral singer much simpler, as I said. And each choir that cared about these things would only have to have one member, learning at the most a few dozen symbols. Besides so many amateur singers are language teachers (I wonder why...?) that the relevant expert would be readily to hand in most cases.

But I put it to a man at OUP who convinced me that it would cause so much upheaval (and cost publishers such a deal of money, I think he meant) that it just won't happen. But a chap can dream....

Enough dreaming though. There are words to be learnt for Saturday.

b
Update 2015.11.19.15.15 – Added PS 

PS A misericord (in the metaphorical sense introduced here): 'Thirteen waters' = treize eaux [geddit? the words that provoke the false liaison are très haut]

Update 2015.11.22.19.35 – Updated the Saturday link, so that it points to something useful a review.

Update 2016.04.16.20.20 – Added PPS and deleted obsolete footer.

Just back from this:

A good   day‘s sing. We sang the Cantique, and – true to form – there was a smattering of the thirteen waters version. Oh well – these things are sent to ... evoke clichés

Sounds like my sort of thing

An article in last Saturday's Times (yes, I know, The Times [sigh]) was a less than glowing review of Richard Dawkins's new book. Not having read (nor intending to read)  it (the book, that is), I don't mean to add to the review, but one assertion quoted leapt to my attention as dubious:

Really? I was saying /'mɑ:li:bəʊn/ (in the brief few turns it took to buy me out of a game of Monopoly™  in those days) several decades before Transport for London was even dreamt of. I wish the reviewer had been more punctilious with his punctuation, as on the basis of this it's nigh-on impossible to determine which bits of the assertion are those of Dawkins. But I imagine the Marylebone instance is his, as is the faintly ridiculous 'classic [BK: Really? Has he any idea of what 'classic' means?] struggle between two memes'. But this isn't a review, so I'll lay off.

Excuse my use of IPA symbols...

<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. 

People complain about 'having to learn a whole new alphabet'. That's nonsense, particularly in the case of English  – which can be adequately transcribed using the letters of the alphabet (most with 'their own' sound – b ⇨ /b/, k ⇨ /k/, s ⇨ /s/, and so on) with a dozen or so new symbols). The system can be taught in a few lessons, makes dictionaries infinitely more informative, absorbing and rewarding, makes modelling and correcting sounds easier and clearer, supports increased learner autonomy.... And yet many learners (and even quite a few teachers, to my utter bewilderment – as I can't conceive of learning a new language [except by total immersion] without using the IPA) resist the idea of learning/teaching IPA symbols. 

</rant>

... but old habits die hard (and dye deep).

<digression>
There are various stories about etymology of that word. [Marylebone, remember?] This site says

...In the thirteenth century when the language of the aristocracy was French, St-Mary-by-the-Tyburn would have been St-Mary-a-le-Bourne (‘bourne’ being the French for a small stream) and from this we arrive at the word ‘Marylebone’ as we know it today.  

Based on this etymology and a progression of phonetics, the correct way of pronouncing ‘Marylebone’ is widely considered to be ‘Marry-leh-bon’ – although in reality this is rarely heard.

As to the meaning of "a progression of phonetics" your guess is as good as mine – though I imagine it may mean something like 'a number of both phonetic and phonological changes' ; after all, those 13th-century origins pre-dated the Great Vowel Shift. 

I once gleaned, from a source that I regarded at the time as authoritative (although as this was in the late '60s I no doubt set the bar pretty low), that ‘-le-bone' just meant 'the good', as le was feminine at the time,  and the convention of doubling a word-final consonant before adding an e for the feminine (for example bon/bonne, cadet/cadette, Bourgignon/Bourgignonne... 

<mini-rant status="stillborn">
No, I won't but... If people would just pronounce the /n/ when they say Bœuf Bourgignonne.  PLEASE.
</mini-rant> 

... etc.) had not yet been adopted by the Académie – which had surely ... (nope, not until the mid-17th) not yet been set up.  Still, -a-le-bourne is plausible enough, and I'm not going to lose any sleep over it either way. On the one hand, beware folk etymologies, especially on special-interest web sites; on the other hand, what's the point  of saying 'St Mary the Good' at all, unless there were a... aha, maybe Mary Magdalene was 'Mary the Bad' (not so 'bad', though, as to stop her being canonized in the end [for all that, by all accounts, she was no better than she SHOULD be, if you catch my drift, and note the colour of this parenthesis. St-Mary-the-Not-So-Bad-Really-(just-not-the-one-in-the-blue-frock), perhaps]).
</digression>

And by the way, while we're on the subject of what was said and when., in that (i.e. Saturday; do keep up) night's televised version of An Inspector Calls, some of the dialogue was surely in Priestley's original. Just before the Great War, it makes sense for both Sheila and the Inspector to say during the 31st minute, 'Why had this to happen?' (where an 21st-century speaker would say 'Why did this have to happen?' – or would they? Maybe it's the sort of Northern English syntax that's still current... I can imagine Sir Geoffrey saying it.)

On the other hand, bits of the dialogue stick out like... something very sticky-outy [I'm avoiding clichés like the pl... um, like something jolly bargepole-y]. Would Gerald really have said 'It's a question of the bottom line'? (the context is a bit uncertain, as I can't find the reference, but he certainly used the expression the bottom line, which Etymonline says is  attested from 1967.)

Well, must be off.


b

PS A couple of clues:

Dildo's met an awful aria. (5,6)
Dumb-show of involuntary movement – that's imitative. (7)

Update: 2015.09.16.08:55 – Whoops... fixed in maroon.
Update: 2015.09.21.15:45 – Added long-overdue clarification in red.
Update: 2016.01.29.15:10 –  Supplied answers to clues, and deleted footer (as I will do in other posts when I get 'a round tuit'. The latest info. is on my other blog.)

PPS The answers: it's been so long that it took me a while to work them out – DIDO'S LAMENT and MIMETIC

When Kant can

More than a year ago (March 2013 is the date on the draft), I made a note about an Italian interpreter on a news programme – no more specific reference, but probably The World at One or the Nine O'clock News:

/hæz tʊ bi:/ - sounded negative - not vowel, but voicing indicates polarity: /hæs tə/ vs /hæzn tə/

I wonder what this meant... Aha – got it. It follows from a point that I became aware of a while ago.

<autobiographical_note date_range="1979" theme="assimilation">

<digression theme="assimilation">
A few days ago this appeared in the twittersphere:

I suspect (the results aren't out yet, but here comes a spoiler) the process whereby /gri:n/ and /kəʊm/ combine to form /gri:ŋ kəʊm/ is assimilation (well, I know it is, but I don't know whether this will be a good enough answer; they might want me to say whether it's progressive or regressive, and I must have nodded off at that part of the lecture...). Assimilation happens when some feature of a speech item (typically voicing or place of articulation) changes to match that of an adjacent item. Anyway, where was I...?
</digression>

The first proper book that I worked on after moving on from the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations  (when I was just temping to see me through my first winter as a freelance polymath) was Geoffrey Sampson's Liberty and Language. It was either here, or in his next book or in editorial discussions in connection with it (unlikely, as they were pretty one-sided ), that he made the observation that it was almost as if there was a new modal, /tə hæftə/ [to haffto], because the voicing of /hæv/ assimilates to the unvoiced /t/ of the 'to' that always follows it (in this modal use). He had even heard a politician saying 'it's a question of haffing to'.
</autobiographical_note>

When a person is involved in a conversation, many things are going on. Apart from the social and physical things (eye contact and so on) and contextual information surrounding the actual event, the participant's brain is having to process a bewildering amount of information [stay with me here, I'm coming back to that Italian interpreter eventually]. Somewhere – I'm pretty sure it was in Crystal's Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language – I saw an account of a conference that set out to analyse a few hours of recorded language. The proceedings of the conference, in the event, were published under the name The First Five Minutes – which contained a book's worth of analysis; the publisher had decided that analysis of all the data would make the book unpublishably big.

In a live speech event, the hearer has a vast amount to do. Which brings us to the Italian interpreter that started all this. The brain of the hearer starts perceiving speech sounds, and then parsing^† them, as soon as possible. Making guesses about where a speech event is going is the only way of participating in a conversation. If you wait until all the inputs are in, and then work out what you want to say in response, and then work out how to say it, you'll have missed your turn^‡ (experto crede  [that's Latin for 'trust me, I know what I'm talking about'].)

So what the listener does is take in clues and cues about what's going to happen^††. In the pair "/hæstə/ ['has to'] versus  /hæznʔtə/ [hasn't to]" the first clue to the negativeness is the voicing of the /z/; the hearer, in the press of efforts to understand what's coming, thinks 'here comes a negative'.

Now, when that interpeter said /hæz tʊ bi:/ I heard the voicing of the /z/ and thought 'Here comes a negative'.

<digression>
The assimilation of the /z/ to the /t/ in the positive involves  voicing rather than place of articulation  – as in the case of /gri:ŋ kəʊm/  (from that #Phonetics quiz) or perhaps (in tribute to my alma mater) I should say /gri:ŋ kɪŋ/ [that's a 'Greene King' reference; if you don't speak fluent IPA don't worry {And I don't mean Greene King IPA, of course}].
</digression>

The inappropriately enunciated /tʊ/ isn't just wrong in an understandable way, it is plain misleading. This (distant, now) speech event underlines something I have often noticed, both as a student of foreign languages and as a teacher of English: one of the features of connected, live, language use is knowing when not to over-pronounce; getting everything right, at the word level, is going to result in getting it wrong at the sentence level.

More recently, the problem of distinguishing between positive and negative arose in the UsingEnglish forum devoted to Pronunciation and Phonetics, but there are things I need to be getting on with; so that will have to wait for an update.

b

Update 2014.05.17.19:00 – Added PS:

PS
That UsingEnglish discussion started with the question What is different between "can" and "can't" when say them.. The question reminded me of my unfinished blog (which, now I think of it, has a title that has made no sense at all until this Update ). The questioner asked:

I am just wondering how English-speekers distinguish these two phases (or words). It seams the only different is the hard-to-heard "t". Then why the language choose this way to indicate total opposite meaning?

As I (eventually) answered, the problem is specific to American English:

Of course, the problem doesn't arise in Br English (though I'm sure many others do ): /kæn/ versus /kɑ:nt/ - and whatever happens to the /t/ the vowel is still distinct..

So I left it to an American contributor to answer before I stuck my oar in.

After correcting 'different', he (I assume he's a he) said

The answer is that to those who know the phonemes of English, the "t" is not at all difficult to hear. When you try to learn a new language, you are forced to begin with the phonemes you are used to, since those are all the phonemes you know. They are all the phonemes that have been relevant to discriminating meaning in the languages you know. But if the foreign language uses other phonemes, your ear is not programmed to hear those other phonemes, because they have never been relevant in your past experience.

I felt this was a bit over-dismissive of the questioner's 'hard to hear[d]', so I leapt to the questioner's defence:

I wouldn't question Newbie's 'hard-to-hear'. I remember in the late '50s being very confused by Perry Como, in 'Magic Moments', singing 'Time can't erase the memory...'. [T]he context (particularly the phrase 'erase the memory') makes it clear this is 'can't'; but I had never met the expression at the time. I suppose this just reinforces the point about  phonemes; I didn't know the phonemes of Am Eng.

But another American English speaker has now added weight to my defence:

It's not uncommon to have to say "I'm sorry - did you say 'can' or 'can't'?" 

I'm not sure what to make of this. Until I read that latest response I thought native speakers could always tell, and that the first answer's 'phonemes of English' just meant 'the phonemes of American English' . Now I'm not so sure.

Update 2014.05.19.11:30 – Added this note:

^†I can feel the eyebrows jerking up here, particular among readers of an age to remember the old Parse and explain exercise in schools (which makes those readers older even than ME – their English teachers would have insisted on 'older than I'). 

 <autobiographical_note date_range="1963-1968" theme="schoolbooks">
I was just on the cusp, with a mixture of prescriptive and more permissive schoolbooks. As our Latin master was Father Provincial [="Big Cheese"] of the Salvatorians (Society of the Divine Saviour), the school had fingers (tentacles?) in many ...erm...pumice stones?; so we tended to get young besuited trainees among the cassocks, flown in for a term or two here and there. These preferred the more permissive/expressive books and parts of the syllabus.
</autobiographical_note>

But by 'parsing' I don't mean 'third person singular of the pluperfect' sort of parsing; I mean simply taking bits of linguistic input and trying to imagine syntactic structures that they might fit in: 'Who's doing the <verb>-ing?, rather than 'Is that the subject of the main clause?  – which, when you think about it, amounts to more or less the same thing.

Update 2015.10.20.12:40 – Added this note, and a few afterthoughts in maroon:

^‡ On re-reading 18 months after the fact, I realize that I was using a semi-technical term here  – semi because although it doesn't really look like one, I was using it to refer to something with technical connotations. I think it was Grice who introduced the notion of a turn in a conversation, although I wouldn't be surprised if it was an idea that he'd been knocking around for many years before Grice propounded his Maxims. (But don't take this as Gospel: my linguistics studies just pre-dated Grices's popularity in linguistics circles [although he was publishing "in my time", and I'm sure I'd have come across him if I'd been a more diligent student]. My acquaintance with Grice [understanding of him would be a bit of an overstatement] is derived from some mugging-up I had to do before teaching an AS set [as described here].)

Update 2015.10.22.09:40 – Added this footnote

^††The idea of reacting (as a listener) ahead of hearing the whole message was underlined on the TV news last night. The interviewer asked something like 'Is there any risk to British security in China's involvement in ...<whatever>?' the Chinese spokesman, speaking in English, said 'Absolutely not.'

But the normal intonation for 'Absolutely not' is one rise and fall: ↷. But he said

'↘ Absolutely... ↘ ...not'

and for a split second [until he said the second word] I thought he was making a most undiplomatic admission. (One would think that a speaker of a tone-language might have been aware of this  – but I suppose there's no reason to think that skill with his sort of intonation (where tones affect meanings of single words) implies sensitivity to mine (where intonation patterns affect overall meanings of utterances).

Update 2015.10.22.12:55 – Added this PPS

PPS On reflection (as frequently happens after a Tai Chi lesson)  this expectation (of 'intonational sensitivity') was unreasonable. As an  ESOL student this Chinese-speaker would have met (and possibly drilled) the use of  'Absolutely' as a standalone response. In this case, the intonation is ↷. So he might have thought of this as the canonical intonation pattern for 'Absolutely',  and this might well have been reinforced by the fact that this intonation pattern is a close match to the Chinese rising-and-falling pattern  – 'L1-interference' as we say in the trade, when a feature of a learner's mother-tongue influences their learning of another.

Update 2018.06.17.10:55 –Added clarification in red.