It’s all(-)inclusive!

A friend of mine from Italy has asked me what the correct Italian pronunciation of the English phrase all-inclusive is. Her question wasn’t so much related to the quality of the vowels as to where to put the stress on the second word of the compound: do Italians follow the English stressing or do they shift it to another syllable?

We all know that the expression all-inclusive in English is pronounced ˌɔːl ɪnˈkluːsɪv, ˌɑːl-, -ɪŋ-, -ˈkluːz- when in isolation and that the main stress is never on the -ɪn- or -ɪŋ- of the second term of the compound, since this usually counts as a non-native learner’s error. In contemporary Standard Italian, though, this is not always the case. Pronunciations like ˌol inˈklusiv, -iŋ-, -ziv and -ˈin-, -ˈiŋ- are all possible and to be heard very frequently. The ones with main stress on the second syllable of inclusive are usually regarded as the traditional variants, that is the correct pronunciations which should be adopted in educated speech. The -ˈin-, -ˈiŋ- pattern, on the other hand, is slightly more recent and is considered by many as sloppy, although it is becoming increasingly common among educated native speakers and, in particular, among Italian travel agents.

To my amazement, the phrase all(-)inclusive is not contained in any of the Italian pronouncing dictionaries I own, but we can find it in the Devoto-Oli (2011, p.88), which dates it back to 2003 and regrettably only shows the variant based on the English pronunciation.

The shifting of stress in Italian trisyllables is particularly tricky. Trisyllabic words traditionally were stressed on the penultimate syllable (as is usual for the majority of Italian words), but today we are witnessing a shift to the antepenultimate syllable, a phenomenon which has been interpreted by linguists as a reaction to the usual pattern ·ˈ··. So, for example, (imprenditore) edile (‘building contractor’) can be both eˈdile and ˈɛdile; Florida is almost always ˈflɔrida and hardly ever floˈrida, flɔ- (though that’s what I heard last week pronounced by a news correspondent on Italian television); Kolossal (‘a blockbuster film’) is traditionally koˈlɔssal but nowadays usually ˈkɔlossal, -lɔs-; salubre (‘healthy’) used to be saˈlubre but today is normally ˈsalubre; zaffiro (‘sapphire’) is now ˈdzaffiro, (maybe also ˈtsaf-), but some people still say dzafˈfiro.

The stress patterns illustrated above are, as I said, extremely common, but sometimes still regarded as incorrect even by distinguished linguists like Paolo D’Achille, Professor of Italian Linguistics at the Università di Roma Tre. In his book L’Italiano Contemporaneo (Il Mulino, 2006), Mr D’Achille refers to these new (?) stress trends as “non standard” (p.104), despite admitting that they are all very widespread.

I personally regard these changes in stress as normal and quite unimpressive. Language changes and always has.

As linguists, I think, we should all concern ourselves with describing what the facts really are rather than drawing up and imposing useless rules which nobody abides by.

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This blog will now take a break. Next post in three weeks’ time.

Quasimodo

This week’s blog is prompted by a post on John Wells’s phonetic blog about the pronunciation of the Latin-derived English prefix quasi-. On July 14^th, several of John’s followers commented on the way the name Quasimodo is pronounced in English, which made me think about its pronunciation in Italian.

In LPD (p.658), under the entry Quasimodo, one finds the note “[t]he Italian poet was kwa ˈziː mo do, kwa zi ˈmɔː do”. Strange, I thought: I’ve never heard the second variant! So I went and looked it up in the DOP (=Dizionario Italiano Multimediale e Multilingue d’Ortografia e di Pronunzia) and found that the pronunciation ₍ˌ₎kwaziˈmɔdo is used (or rather, should be used, as the authors put it in the dictionary) in the expression domenica (di) Quasimodo (or quasimodo), another name for domenica in albis, (in the Christian Church) the first Sunday after Easter. The phrase is apparently derived from the Latin expression quasi modo geniti infantes (‘like newborn babies’), which is nowadays still (sometimes) used at the beginning of Mass on the Sunday after Easter.

The authors of the DOP also note that the name Quasimodo should be given penultimate stress if one is referring to the protagonist of the novel The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1831) by Victor Hugo, but it can also be – and today usually is – kwaˈzimodo if you’re referring to the Italian poet Salvatore Quasimodo (1901-1968).

To be honest, I don’t think this is completely true. Italians nowadays always (?) stress the word Quasimodo on the second syllable, whether they are talking about Hugo’s fictional character or the name of the late poet. The pronunciation ₍ˌ₎kwaziˈmɔdo is considered affected and old-fashioned and I would go so far as to say that it is today totally unknown by the majority of Italians.

Canepàri (or indeed Canepari – Jack, remember?) rightly gives kwaˈzimodo as the main pronunciation and kwaziˈmɔdo as the “traditional” one, by which he means the pronunciation recommended by elocution and acting teachers in the past. This may indicate, thus, that apart from actors, no one in Italy has really ever used the variant with penultimate stress.

As far as Salvatore Quasimodo is concerned, the DiPI (p.417) makes it clear that it is pronounced “salvaˈtore kwaˈzimodo”, though this entry, too, is incomplete, as some Italians use s in the surname, others ɔ instead of o in the penultimate syllable of the same word; others still use both.

Am I wrong in this? Is there any Italian out there who says kwaziˈmɔdo, as the dictionary by RAI prescribes?

New English File Advanced

I’ve been using the general English coursebook New English File Advanced with some of my students for some time now. The book is by C. Oxenden and C. Latham-Koenig and was published by OUP in 2010.

It is an interesting book as it contains authentic texts and listenings, two-page writing lessons, video interviews, focus on lexis in context, an extended grammar bank, and – more importantly – a lot of pronunciation activities (including dictations with several different English accents).

Despite the wealth of exercises and downloadable material provided, I have to admit that some of the explanations and activities concerning the phonetics and phonology of English in the book are a bit confusing or not totally correct. This is due, I think, to the fact that the authors have tried to apply hard and fast rules to the language to make it neater and more straightforward for students when in fact no rules can be provided except ‘passively observing’ what native speakers actually say or write.

In exercise 6a on page 15, for instance, they offer a list of words and ask students to circle the only one that is different from the others. The following words should be analysed as containing or lacking the /h/ phoneme: hurt, heir, adhere, hardly, himself. Now, which one would you circle? Probably heir, which is eə(r) in RP. But what about adhere? Most people pronounce it with h but some without (cf.EPD, p.7). And what does one have to make of himself? In unstressed positions, not at the beginning of a sentence or clause, this word usually has the weak form ɪmˈself. Also, what about h-dropping? I think this is a phenomenon that should be pointed out in an advanced course book.

On page 26, a pronunciation bank on “linking” is provided:

“When people talk quickly, they usually link words together, i.e. the sound at the end of one word is linked to the sound at the beginning of the next (...):

1 A consonant sound at the end of a word is linked to a vowel sound at the beginning of the next, e.g. I met him‿a long time‿ago.”

Is this really an example of linking? Here there is no break between the words: one word just smoothly follows the other. And why then is no linking shown between met and him?

“2 When a word ending in –r or –re (e.g. are) is followed by a word beginning with a vowel sound, an /r/ sound is added to link the words together, e.g. We’re‿early. “

It is not always the case. Some speakers in this environment use linking /r/, others pause before the other word; others still use a glottal stop in between the two words (cf. Gimson’s Pronunciation of English, p.305).

Finally, on page 29, it’s the turn of words and phrases of French origin:

“A number of French words and phrases are used in English. They are usually said in a way that is close to their French pronunciation, and so do not necessarily follow normal English pronunciation patterns, e.g. ballet (/ˈbæleɪ/), rendezvous (/ˈrɒndeɪvuː/).”

This is not 100 percent correct. Ballet is pronounced balɛ, -le in French, with stress on its final syllable, thus more similar to GA bæˈleɪ. (Words borrowed from French are normally stressed on the first syllable in British English but they very often have final-syllable stress in American English.) And just what are normal English pronunciation patterns? Do pronunciations like ˈbæleɪ or bæˈleɪ sound strange or foreign to native speakers?

Summertime

It’s summertime. Here in Italy most people are getting ready to go to the seaside. And so am I! But just how do you pronounce seaside in English? (Don’t worry, it’s not a silly question!) As far as I know, LPD is the only pronunciation dictionary which acknowledges both ˈsiːsaɪd and ˌsiːˈsaɪd. All other pronouncing dictionaries only have ˈsiːsaɪd. I myself say ˈsiːsaɪd and use the same stress pattern in the phrase seaside resort, ˌsiːsaɪd rəˈzɔːt. Are there NSs out there who have a different stressing?

Taking a look at this page from the Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary online, one also discovers that Americans don’t usually use the expression going to the seaside (the OALD marks it as “especially British English”), preferring seaside as a premodifier instead. (This is also supported by data from both the COCA and BNC.)

On the same page one can find a link to the phrase whelk stall. As you would expect, the word whelk can be pronounced both welk and hwelk. As far as this latter pronunciation goes, LPD (p.897) correctly states that “an initial hw in the sense ‘shellfish’ is not supported by the etymology”.

This statement is backed up by my Oxford Dictionary of English (2^nd edition revised, 2005; p.2004), which distinguishes between the mollusc (1) and an archaic term for a pimple (2):

“whelk¹ ► noun a predatory marine mollusc with a heavy pointed spiral shell, some kinds of which are edible [...].

- ORIGIN Old English wioloc, weoloc, of unknown origin; the spelling with wh- was perhaps influenced by WHELK².

whelk² ► noun archaic a pimple.

- ORIGIN Old English hwylca, related to hwelian ‘suppurate’. “

Internet and j’s

I’ve acquired a copy of a recently published Italian book entitled Viva la Grammatica (pictured right), by Valeria Della Valle and Giuseppe Patota (Sperling & Kupfer, 2011). According to the authors, the book is for anyone interested in discovering “il lato sconosciuto, insospettabile, sorprendentemente divertente della grammatica” (‘the unknown and unusual, but also surprisingly entertaining aspects of grammar’) (blurb).

Valeria Della Valle is Professor of Italian Linguistics at the Università la Sapienza, Rome, whereas Giuseppe Patota teaches History of the Italian Language at the Università degli Studi di Siena, Arezzo. Both our academics stress in the introduction to their book (p.XVI) that they prefer to be called descriptive linguists:

“Noi, come abbiamo dimostrato nei libri precedenti, e come potranno constatare i nuovi lettori, preferiamo le regole [...] non quelle che prescrivono, ma quelle che descrivono come è fatta e come funziona la nostra lingua”.

(‘As we have many times stated in our books, and as our readers will notice in this one, we prefer descriptive to prescriptive rules, because they can tell us exactly how our language works.’)

On page XVII of the introduction they conclude by making the following remark:

“a molte delle domande e a molti dei dubbi sull’uso corretto o sbagliato di una forma spesso siamo obbligati a rispondere: si può dire in tutti e due i modi. La regola è che non c’è una sola regola...”.

(‘when we get questions concerning the correct usage of one form or another, we often answer that there is no single way of expressing a particular concept. The rule is that there isn’t only one single rule...’)

I’m sorry to say, though, that none of what you’ve just read is what you’ll find in the book. The entire 267-page volume is dismayingly riddled with expressions like “la pronuncia corretta è” (‘the correct pronunciation is’), “bisogna usare” (‘one has to use’), “bisogna dire” (‘one has to say’), etc. The authors are far from being descriptive!

In the first chapter, dedicated to the alphabet, Ms Della Valle and Mr Patota discuss the names of some of the letters which are quite unusual in Italian spelling (j, k, w, x, y). As far as the letter j is concerned, they make it absolutely clear that “in italiano questa lettera va chiamata i lunga, non jay” (‘in Italian this letter is to be called i lunga [=’long i’], not jay [=as in English j]’). Why? There’s no reason why j should be called in only one way. After all, the overwhelming majority of younger people today call it dʒɛi! Even Canepàri, who is usually very prescriptive, lists this as a possible pronunciation in his DiPI (2009, p.294): ilˈlunɡa,ˈdʒɛi, ˈdʒei, ˈjɔd, ↓ˈjɔta. (The symbol ↓ indicates that the last variant, according to the author, is to be regarded as ‘slovenly’ and thus to be avoided.)

On page 20, the authors provide the readers with a list of 30 words which in Italian have two (or more) possible pronunciations. But in their opinion only one of these is right. So, for instance, amaca (‘hammock’) is aˈmaka not ˈamaka; cosmopolita (‘cosmopolitan’) is ˌkozmopoˈlita, not ˌkozmoˈpɔlita; dissuadere (‘to dissuade’) is ˌdissuaˈdeɾe, not ˌdissuˈadeɾe or indeed ˌdisˈswadeɾe. Why such useless rigidity? In Italian all these variants are perfectly possible and indeed extremely common!

Among these words there’s also a relatively recent one: Internet. But how does one pronounce it? Is the main stress on the first syllable or on the last one? Well, the authors of Viva la Grammatica (pp.25-26) say that

“la pronuncia originaria è Internèt, con l’accento sulla e: non solo negli Stati Uniti e in Gran Bretagna, ma anche in Spagna, America Latina, Francia e Germania si segue questa pronuncia”.

(‘the original pronunciation is Internèt [=with stress on the last syllable]: this pronunciation is used not only in the USA and Great Britain, but also in Spain, Latin America, France and Germany.’)

Of course this is absolute nonsense! Internet in both British and American English is stressed on the FIRST syllable; in Spanish and French it is stressed on the last; and in German again on the FIRST, like in English. In Italian both ˈin- and -ˈnɛt occur, the former variant being more common than the latter.

The explanation furnished by the authors for the preference in current Italian for the stress on the first syllable is that “chi parla avverte Inter come parola a sé, separata da net, e la pronuncia con l’accento sulla i” (p.26) (‘native speakers regard the word as a compound made up of Inter and net, and thus put the stress on the i’). I think this is not the case, particularly since the term Internet came into Italian from the English. When Italians first started using it (about 1995, according to the Devoto-Oli 2011), they borrowed it directly with its original English stressing.

(If you’re brave enough to watch a video clip in Italian, here’s Ms Della Valle on the TV programme Le Storie, discussing grammatical and pronunciation matters.)