-meter/-metre

Another question from my students this week was why in English we say ba'rometer, with stress on the second syllable, and not 'barometer, with (main) stress on the first.

The suffix -meter/-metre in English can be pronounced in two different ways: (a) ˌmiːtə (RP)/ˌmit̬r̩ (GA); (b) mɪtə, mətə (RP)/mət̬r̩ (GA). Pronunciation (a) tends to be used 1) with units of length: 'centiˌmeter/metre, and sometimes 2) in the meaning "measuring device": 'voltˌmeter. The stress-imposing pronunciation (b) is used 1) with reference to versification: he'xameter, pen'tameter, and sometimes again 2) in the meaning "measuring device": ba'rometer. Hence the different pronunciations of the two senses of the word micrometer: micrometer/micrometre meaning "micron" is normally stressed on the first syllable (although some people also stress it on the second); micrometer the instrument, on the other hand, is always stressed on the second syllable.
In the terms altimeter and kilometer/kilometre, the two types of pronunciations explained above have been confused, giving thus rise to competing variants with different stressings. In particular, with the word kilometer/kilometre Professor John Wells has shown that, although this term is constructed on the analogy of centimeter/centimetre and millimeter/millimetre, which are stressed on the first syllable, today the -ˈlɒm- form tends to predominate both in British English and in American English. See the pie charts below:

Wimbledon

Several of my Italian students this week were flabbergasted when I told them that the pronunciation of the famous district of south London, Wimbledon, was not ˈwimblədɒn but ˈwɪmbəldən. I guess, this is a word whose pronunciation most EFL learners - not just Italians! - very often get wrong. This is probably because they fail to recognise its analysis as Wimble plus the old Anglo-Saxon suffix -don.

According to Wikipedia,

[t]he name Wimbledon means "Wynnman's hill", with the final element of the name being the Old English dun (hill). The current spelling appears to have been settled on relatively recently in the early 19th century, the last in a long line of variations.
The village is referred to as "Wimbedounyng" in a charter signed by King Edgar the Peaceful in 967 and is shown on J Cary's map of the London area as "Wimbleton".

The stem Wimble rhymes with nimble, the final consonant sound being the same as in incredible, able, unbelievable. Also, the syllable-final phoneme sequence blə which they used in the version they produced is not possible as far as English phonotactics is concerned.

Finally, in RP the Anglo-Saxon suffixes -ton, -don, -ham in placenames like Southampton or Birmingham are always unstressed and weak. Not always so in General American: cf. Birmingham ˈbɜ˞mɪŋhæm.

Lon[g]evity?

While watching yesterday evening's Tony Blair interview with Andrew Marr on BBC2, I was slightly surprised by the way the presenter pronounced the word longevity: he said lɒŋˈgevəti instead of the traditional lɒnˈdʒevəti/lɒŋˈdʒevəti.

I have to admit that it's not the first time I've heard such a pronunciation, although none of the current pronouncing dictionaries seem to allow it.
I think one of the possible reasons for the existence of this variant form is that people might be influenced by the way they pronounce the term longitude. As John Wells has shown in his LPD3, people today are increasingly going for ˈlɒŋgɪtjuːd (85%), instead of ˈlɒndʒɪtjuːd (15%). See the preference poll graph below:



What about you? How do you pronounce longevity?

You can watch the last bit of the interview with Tony Blair here. (Andrew Marr pronounces longevity with a "hard g" towards the first half of the 12th minute.)

And for those Italians who read the monthly magazine Speak Up, there's an interview with one John Burton in the August issue (article The Music of Time, track 11), in which the interviewee pronounces the word longevity with g. The comment by Rachel Roberts at the end of the magazine (p.65) is that English pronunciation is so difficult that even native speakers get it wrong.
No, Rachel! That's NOT the way it is! Pronunciations come and go. Language is a living and constantly changing thing. If some people (are starting to) say lɒŋˈgevəti, you just have to accept it. And who knows? In the future, this variant may well become the new established form!

And finally, if you want to read some further comments on this topic, here is where you can find them.

(For more on idiosyncratic pronunciations you can also read this post by Jack Windsor Lewis.)

Non-words, innit?

Wurfing, precuperate, polkadodge: are you familiar with any of these words? - Or perhaps I should ask: are you familiar with any of these "NON-words"?

"Non-words" are said to be terms widely used by people today but which are not considered as "words" because they haven't made it yet into the Oxford English Dictionary (OED). Oxford University Press has judged them to be "unsuitable" because there is not enough evidence that people are using them.
Graphic designer Luke Ngakane has recently uncovered expressions like freegans, earworm, or dringle - terms which he apparently uses in his everyday speech or has heard spoken by other people - as part of a research project for London's Kingston University. He hopes that today's "non-words" will become "proper words" in the future by being incorporated into the OED.
Joined by Iain Aitch and presenters Charlie Stayt and Susanna Reid, Mr Ngakane discusses his findings in an interesting BBC Breakfast interview that you can watch here.
If you want to know more about this topic, you can also read the articles posted on the Metro website and on the Telegraph one.

Just one little thought: why should "experts" classify expressions such as the ones we mentioned above under "non-words" if people seem to be using them? Are words recognised as such only when they are included in a dictionary?

Some more CELTA phonology

I've spotted another mistake in The CELTA Course Trainee Book by Scott Thornbury and Peter Watkins (see my blog for 4th July 2010). On page 155 the authors discuss how vowel sounds are produced in English and then provide their own definition of a 'diphthong': "a glide from one vowel to another".

Now, this definition is not complete. If it were so, then the words Lyons - the place in France - (ˈliːɒ̃) and neon (ˈniːɒn) would both contain a diphthong - but they DO NOT because they are characterised by two separate syllables.

A diphthong is then a movement (or glide) from one vowel to another within a single syllable.

The same mistake can also be found on page 13 of The TKT Course (2005, CUP) by Mary Spratt, Alan Pulverness, and Melanie Williams.

Magic Italy?

Since yesterday morning, a video has been doing the rounds both on YouTube and in the national news bulletins. You can watch it here. In it, Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi enhances the beauty of Italy by referring to it as "magica Italia". The video is very nice and the idea of trying to encourage Italians as well as foreigners to take their holidays in our country is laudable.

There's just one thing that bugs me: it's the English translation of the expression "magica Italia" which comes at the end of the video clip. Whoever translated "magica Italia" as "magic Italy" doesn't know that in English the adjective "magico" can be translated in two different ways: magic and magical. The former is the more common and is used in a number of fixed expressions like a magic wand, the magic word, magic tricks, magic spells, expressions that is which are generally related to magic or supernatural powers. The latter, on the other hand, is used in place of magic especially in metaphorical senses like 'wonderful', 'exciting', 'romantic', 'enjoyable', as in a magical country, or magical landscapes.

If you think I'm talking nonsense, you can either read page 230 of Swan's (2005) Practical English Usage, published by Oxford University Press, or check the use of magic and magical in the British National Corpus or in the Corpus of Contemporary American English. That's what I did myself, too, and the answer is that I could only find examples of magical + country and none of magic + country. Which means that the phrase "magic Italy" in the video is WRONG and needs correcting to "magicAL Italy".

PS: Here's a video by the BBC. Notice how Duncan Kennedy, after referring to Berlusconi's "magica Italia" with the expression "Magic Italy", he calls it, immediately switches to Italy's magicAL sights towards the beginning of his report.

CELTA phonology

On page 156 of The CELTA Course Trainee Book (Cambridge, 2007) by Scott Thornbury and Peter Watkins, the authors discuss the vowel and consonant sounds of English and remark that "[f]or teaching purposes, the sounds of English are often displayed in the form of a phonemic chart":

In the phonemic chart on the left are listed the vowels and consonants of RP, whereas in the one on the right you can see the symbols corresponding to the sounds of North American English. (It should be noted though that on page 155 the authors refer to RP using the wrong expression "Standard British English", thus confusing an accent of English with a dialect.)
As is evident from the image above, the systems of transcription used in the charts are similar but not the same. The one on the left in fact conforms to the principles of the International Phonetic Association (IPA); the one on the right doesn't, as it follows a different AmE tradition, namely that of Trager and Smith. This tradition analyses the English long vowels and diphthongs as consisting of a short vowel plus one of the semivowels (called "peak satellites") j, w, h, the latter being realised postvocalically either as a schwa offglide or as the lengthening of a mid or low vowel. In addition, stress is marked by putting acute or grave accents over vowels (é, è), not by putting marks high up before the stressed syllable as in the IPA.
For me both systems of transcription are perfectly ok; it's just that I don't think it's necessary having to teach or learn two relatively different systems of notation at the same time. Indeed, it's a complete waste of time! Also, it seems as though Thornbury and Watkins were suggesting that you can only use IPA for RP and the Trager-Smith system for General American, which just isn't true. Either system will do! Wouldn't it be much easier then for both teachers and students alike to go for just one system without having to resort to using two systems in order to highlight the differences in vowel realisation and inventory between RP and General American? Phonetics and phonology is already a very complex part of the teaching of English: why do you want to make it more complicated than it is?
By the way, if I had to choose between one system or the other, I would definitely go for the IPA one. The Trager and Smith tradition in fact isn't trendy any longer and it wasn't so even when John Wells in the 1980s was writing his Accents of English.
Why then teach the Trager and Smith notation system when almost all the pronunciation dictionaries and EFL textbooks on the market nowadays make use of the IPA script?