some-antics.com

Recently, on Family Guy:

And a related linguistlist post:

Proto-Indo-European */k/ developed regularly to /h/ (or /x/, if you
prefer) in the Germanic languages, by the First Germanic Consonant
Shift (Grimm’s Law). The resulting fricative was generally pronounced
[h] in syllable-initial position but [x] in syllable-final position,
much as in modern German.

The PIE initial cluster */kw-/ accordingly developed in Old English
into /hw-/: hence, for example, Old English `what’ and
`wheat’.

The spelling was changed after the Norman conquest, apparently under
Norman influence, to the modern , and hence orthographic
and .

The pronunciation remained /hw-/ in England for centuries, at least
for most speakers.

[…]

The Linguistic Atlas of the Eastern USA, compiled over a generation
ago, shows /hw-/ as normal in most places, with /w-/ the norm in just
three areas, all of them on the east coast: a large area centered on
metropolitan New York, and two smaller ones centered on Boston and
Charleston/Savannah. This distribution strongly suggests that /w-/
was introduced from England into these port cities and began spreading
out from there.

In the last generation, the innovating /w-/ has been spreading across
the USA with astounding speed. The American linguist William Bright
recently told me (p.c.) that /hw-/ was now confined to “a handful of
old fogies”. I myself (I’m from western New York State) have /hw-/,
like my parents, but my two brothers and my sister (all younger) have
only /w-/. My mother is acutely conscious of this; she notices the
/w-/ of the young people and regards it as objectionable.

emma :: Aug.04.2007 :: phonology, phonetics, linguistics, pop-culture :: 14 Comments »

Last night there was a segment on the Daily Show called “Nip/Talk” in which a correspondent interviewed first a dermatologist and then a speech coach. The second half involved instruction on the importance of signaling your end of turn in an interview, reminiscent of the Beattie 1982 paper we read in Speech Prosody this semester, where the conversation styles of Margaret Thatcher and Jim Callahan were compared.

Check out the segment here.

emma :: May.16.2007 :: misc, phonology, phonetics, linguistics, pop-culture :: No Comments »

With my Speech Prosody project & presentation done, the end of the semester is finally in sight. I really really like the SOF phenomenon – it covers issues both about the phonetics/phonology interface (is focus marking just a binary, discrete issue, pitch-accented or not pitch-accented? or is it a more gradient effect?) and the phonetics/semantics interface. So I’m really happy to have found this topic. I’ll post my presentation notes and the final paper when this whole thing is wrapped up.

I think I’ll take a break from all this for a few days, though, and focus on semantics for a bit. I have a lot of cool new things to think about.

emma :: May.08.2007 :: misc, semantics, phonology, phonetics, linguistics :: No Comments »

Awesome awesome video of a woman singing with clicks.  (Mama Afrika, native speaker of Xhosa.)

Props galore to Aaron for posting this at his blog!

emma :: Feb.09.2007 :: misc, phonetics, linguistics :: No Comments »

Pierrehumbert, et al. (2000) Conceptual Foundations of Phonology as a Laboratory Science

for Stefan Benus’ Phonology-Phonetics Interface seminar. Very clear overview of “laboratory phonology”, its goals, methodology and theoretical assumptions.

emma :: Jan.29.2007 :: misc, reading, phonology, phonetics :: No Comments »