Language Lore

Archive for September, 2008

In the last few years one hears increasingly the mispronunciation of the word homage, whose pedigree in English as an Old French loan word goes back to at least the 13th century (1290 being the date of the earliest OED attestation). Anyone who has it as a secure item of vocabulary and has actually heard it pronounced by knowledgeable speakers on both sides of the Atlantic knows that (1) the stress falls on the first syllable; (2) the initial vowel is the same as in the word palm, whether pronounced “aichlessly” (with H-dropping) or not, both being correct; (3) the second vowel is unstressed and, therefore, the same as in the word garbage; ditto (4) the final consonant. The phonetic transcription is, consequently, [(h)ɑ́mɨǯ].
Younger speakers in America who utter this word can be heard pronouncing it à la française, i.e. with the stress on the last syllable, no [h], and a final fricative [ž]; thus [omáž].
One Englishman wrote to the NPR Ombudsman in 2004 to alert the network to this mistake, and his warning is reproduced as follows (Jeffrey A. Dvorkin, “The Joy of Text,” NPR.org, November 23, 2004):

‘Hom-age… not O-mahj’

Jonathan Leonhart is a listener in London who writes to say that NPR should pronounce the word “homage” with a soft “H,” as an English and not as a French word:

Could you please circulate a memo to all your NPR correspondents and show hosts… informing them of the PROPER pronunciation of the word “homage?” The people you hear most frequently mispronouncing it as a French word are the Hollywood airheads in their commentary accompaniments on DVDs. “O-mahj…  o-mahj… o-mahj” Give me a break. It’s as pathetic as the classic over-correction “between he and I”–a semi-literate attempt to sound “smart,” made so much sadder by how wrong it is.

Leonhart helpfully includes a link to pronunciation from Merriam-Webster (“an AMERICAN dictionary,” he hastens to add).

The key word in Mr. Leonhart’s letter is “airheads.” It is ignorance pure and simple that accounts for this erroneous pronunciation. And it is far from the only instance of insecure knowledge of one’s own language being at the root of linguistic change.

MICHAEL SHAPIRO

What is traditionally called spelling pronunciation is actually a misnomer: it should be called reading pronunciation because all such incorrect pronunciations actually arise in the process of reading unfamiliar words rather than spelling them. Modern dictionaries such as The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (4th ed., 2006) typically dignify these errors by listing them alongside the traditionally correct form. For example, the reading pronunciation of equinox, with the same first vowel as echo, is given (second) after the form with the same first vowel as equal.
For the most part, reading pronunciations arise in words of Latinate (Anglo-Norman) origin, specifically and primarily as concerns the vowels of a given word. Here, British English has a long and venerable tradition of Anglicizing the pronunciation by rendering the vowels as diphthongs. Hence, for instance, instead of pronouncing pace ‘with the permission of; with deference to’ (< Latin pāce, ablative of pāx ‘peace’) as [pɛ́isi:] to rhyme with racy, speakers who have never actually heard this word uttered by a knowledgeable person will pronounce it [pɑ́čɛi], i.e. the stressed first vowel to rhyme with pocket, the unstressed second with hay, in accordance with the misguided American practice that makes Latin into a kind of Italian, and in fact it is this pronunciation of pace that is registered in The American Heritage Dictionary, which lists it first.
It is ignorance of the traditional anglicized pronunciation––nothing more, nothing less––that accounts not only for the erroneous pronunciation of Latinate vocabulary but of foreign nomina propria like Ossetia/Ossetian and Iran/Iranian that have been much in the news lately as well. In each such instance, the traditional diphthong of the stressed vowel is replaced by a monophthong that is the result of a reading pronunciation.

MICHAEL SHAPIRO

In the recent past, American English has resuscitated what had fallen into disuse in the grammatical range of the verb advocate, namely its intransitivity, with the concomitant government of the postposition for. What the Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia marked as rare in 1906 has come back as the dominant syntactic profile of this verb, as in:

“It is an organization that has made a decision to cast aside its journalistic integrity and to advocate for the defeat of one candidate … and advocate for the election of another candidate,” he [a spokesman for the McCain campaign] said. (“McCain Aide Blows Gasket, Rips New York Times,” Jimmy Orr, “The Vote Blog,” The Christian Science Monitor, 9/22/08)

It is in fact this syntax that has all but displaced the traditional transitive government of the verb.
The Oxford English Dictionary entry shows that what may seem to be a contemporary innovation is actually a resuscitated archaism, witness the following attestations:

1. intr. To act as advocate, to plead for. arch.
1641 MILTON Animadv. §1 (1847) 58/2 It had been advocated and moved for by some honourable and learned gentlemen of the house. 1659 FULLER App. Inj. Innoc. (1840) 339 I wonder that the Animadvertor will advocate for their actions, so detrimental to the church. 1661 HEYLIN Ref. I. ii. 37, I will not take upon me to Advocate for the present distempers and confusions of this wretched Church. 1872 F. HALL False Philol. 75, I am not going to advocate for this sense of actual [i.e. as = present].

As a curious sidebar to the story, the transitive meaning, which we take for granted and as needing no exemplification, was one that Benjamin Franklin found worthy of “reprobation,” as in the following OED attestation given under 3. trans.To plead or raise one’s voice in favour of; to defend or recommend publicly:

1789 FRANKLIN Lett. to N. Webster 26 Dec. Wks. 1840 X. 414 During my late  absence in France, I find that several new words have been introduced into our parliamentary language. For example I find a verb..from the substantive advocate; the gentleman who advocates or has advocated that motion..If you should happen to be of my opinion with respect to these innovations you will use your authority in reprobating them.

How to explain this resurrection of an archaic meaning? We need to examine what transitivity implies that intransitivity does not.
When a verb governs the direct object, the action of the verb is transferred directly onto the object without any mediation. Not so an intransitive verb, since there is no direct object. As a matter of fact, as in the case of advocate for, if a postposition mediates between the verb and its object, there is necessarily an ATTENTUATION OF THE FORCE of the verb, such that here the act of advocating is necessarily less forceful than it is when the verb is used with its traditional transitive syntax.
Thus the contemporary intransitive syntax of advocate with the postposition for takes its place among constructions like lobby for, plump for, speak for, even search for, etc., where the activity denoted becomes generalized, hence attenuated. “Advocating for world peace” is not the same as “advocating world peace:” the first denotes one of those vague sets of actions that peace-loving people (“peaceniks” et al.) engage in; the second involves a definite commitment.
Speaking of commitment, it is interesting to note the converse directionality of the change in modern (mostly American) English that has resulted in all modern dictionaries dropping the traditional obligatory government of commit that requires the reflexive form self (commit oneself/herself/themselves, etc.). And just as in the case of advocate for, where the intransitivity connotes a weakening of the verb’s force, here the analysis is exactly parallel: the dropping of an obligatory reflexive after commit implies that the original force of the verb meaning ‘pledge/bind oneself’ has been denatured so as to mean an action that is less than binding. The new syntax in both instances is an icon of the new semantics.

MICHAEL SHAPIRO

Recent media interest in rhetorical figures (e.g. NPR’s program “On the Media,” 9/19/08) prompted by campaign speeches that exploit them has centered on antimetabole, which is (pace Janet Lapidos on Slate.com, 9/12/08) a species of chiasmus, defined as any structure in which the constituents are repeated in reverse, yielding the pattern ABBA. An oft-cited example of antimetabole is Quintilian’s Non ut edam vivo, sed ut vivam edo “I do not live that I may eat, but eat that I may live” (Institutio oratoria 9.3.85). This figure is related to such others in the nomenclature as polyptoton and antanaclasis. What unites them, besides their being patterned repetitions, is the master trope, PARONOMASIA, alias the pun.
What puns in ordinary discourse do–like any paronomasia–is (inter alia) call attention to themselves by exposing a formal resemblance (including complete identity) that undergirds semantic difference. Paronomasia rises to loftier heights as the stock in trade of poetic language. In the tradition of European verse, even rhyme is a kind of paronomasia. What is important to understand in rhyme, moreover, is the fact of its functioning to establish a semantic equivalence between rhyme-fellows despite their difference in meaning. Any two words that rhyme are ipso facto likened to each other in meaning by the very fact of their form as such. As with all elements of poetic language, form thereby becomes a part of content.
This condition is important to understand in assaying the impact of rhetorical figures like antimetabole. Beyond the simple fact of their calling attention to themselves as formal entities (the so-called poetic function), they have the further effect of calling the very fixity of meaning into question (what the Russian Formalists termed ostranenie ‘making it strange’ and made the foundation of their theory of modern aesthetics). Paronomastic figures like antimetabole tend to undermine this fixity of meaning. Nowhere is this more potent than in the unmasking of clichés or fixed phrases.
When politicians maunder about “change” while resorting to figures like antimetabole–presumably because the figure recalls other (and more illustrious) politicians’ use of it (Roosevelt, Churchill)–there may be some half-conscious sense on the speechwriters’ part that weakening the fixity of meaning in this way lends rhetorical support to the message of “change.” Form thus enters content. But there is also a cost to this rhetorical strategy, and it is not just that prominent use of figures of speech tends to detract from the message by underscoring “rhetoric” at the expense of “substance.” Rather, it is that focus on the message for its own sake (the ‘how,’ alias the poetic function) always tends to abrade the validity of the referential function (the ‘what’) of the same message. Form as part of content thus poses an epistemological danger, one which Plato detected long ago when he called poets liars in the Republic.

MICHAEL SHAPIRO

English may be a Germanic language, but aside from words borrowed long ago (like kindergarten) there seem to be very few outright Germanisms in the language today (not counting Yiddishisms, hence the use of the term “Teutonisms”), although quite some time ago Marianne Shapiro (with her acute sense of such matters) noticed the penetration, into ad-speak particularly but not only–perhaps as latent typological atavisms–of such constructions as doctor-tested and even user-friendly (which latter formation doubtless derives from computer lingo) as evidence for a plausible Germanic susbstratum in contemporary American English.
Recently, in American media language, the German preposition/prefix  über has cropped up as a prefix with all form classes, signifying (apparently) some sort of extreme degree of whatever is designated by the base. How über- came into English is not clear to me; it is not attested in either the Oxford English Dictionary Online or any American dictionary. Needless to say, journalists who use this prefix appear not to have any German. I consider it a fatuous barbarism.
In that vein, this morning (9/18/08) I heard a reporter on the radio (Stacey Vanek-Smith, “Marketplace Morning Report,” American Public Media, KPCC-FM 89.3, Pasadena) read the words Sturm und Drang (“Storm and Stress”) as [stɜ́rməndrɑ́ŋ], where (1) the vowels of the first and last words–the two nouns–were those of English term and wrong, respectively, and the consonant of the first word was [s] rather than the correct [š]; and (2) the conjunction was unstressed, elided the final consonant [t] (German lenis obstruents being realized as fortis in syllable-final position), and had a schwa for the German [u].
Now, a radio announcer reading from a text that she probably had very little to do with writing may certainly be excused for not pronouncing the phrase for an eighteenth-century German cultural movement in a way that conformed in every detail with German phonetics, but there is, after all, The American Heritage Dictionary (4th ed., 2006), which lists Sturm und Drang and gives the pronunciation as (shtoorm unt dräng), so why not look it up–especially since it is more than likely that the utterer had no German and no knowledge of what this phrase meant, even in context? Here the mispronounced Teutonism is a barbarism.
When native speakers of American English habitually pronounce Köchel (the abbreviated form of G Köchelverzeichnis, used to designate Mozart’s oeuvre after the surname of his cataloguer) as [kɜ́ršəl]–thus mangling the original language’s phonetics with an epenthetic [r] and an alveolar instead of a velar fricative–one has come to expect it as the usual anglicized version. Moreover, pronouncing it in the echt-German way would now doubtless itself be evaluated as a barbarism as well.

MICHAEL SHAPIRO

Broad A and Flat A

Verb/Noun Stress Contasts

Barbarisms

There is perhaps no more important island in the world. Those who live there or are familiar with the correct pronunciation of its name say M[ə]nháttan, with a schwa in the first syllable, unlike those who either know the correct pronunciation and choose to ignore it or are simply ignorant of it.
(As a former resident of Manhattan [1980-2003], I can report that it grates on my ear every time I hear the word mispronounced.)
In the case of Manhattan, Kansas, or Manhattan Beach, California, naturally, the relevant vowel is not a schwa but the expected [æ].
This case illustrates the possibility that local pronunciations of toponyms may differ from generally more familiar ones. In the USA, think of towns that carry the name Vienna, Cairo, and Berlin but diverge phonetically from their form as designations of foreign cities.

The Evisceration of Meaning