The virtual linguist

British accents in Game of Thrones

The television series Game of Thrones is far more popular in the US than in Britain (it is shown on a pay-tv channel in the UK). The series is based on the books of an American, George RR Martin. The accents, though, are all British - and regional British at that, which I found out when I read this BBC article today.

 

In the BBC piece, American TV critic Matt Zoller says that the British accent is the usual accent used in sci-fi and fantasy films, as well as films set in ancient Greece and Rome. "A British accent is sufficiently exotic to transport the viewer to a different reality," claims Zoller. The only American actor to play a leading part, Peter Dinklage, puts on a British accent in the role. The series is based on north/south conflict and the characters in the series from the north of the realm use northern English accents (Sean Bean and Mark Addy speak with a Yorkshire accent, for example).

 

For the full BBC article, click here.

Vocal fry

Young American women are increasingly copying celebrities such as Kim Kardashian and Britney Spears and introducing the technique of vocal fry into their speech "No waaaaaaaay" and "Oh my Gaaaaaaahhhd"). Technically, vocal fry is the lowest vocal register and the resulting sound is low and croaky. The technique enables singers to hit low notes and to make them last.

 

In a small study a group of US college students were asked to read some sentences. About two thirds of the women exhibited the 'creak', but men, on the whole, did not 'creak' at all. Researchers surmise that young women may use the technique to show group membership and/or solidarity.

 

For a couple of articles about the study with links to hear examples see here and here, and there's a lot of erudite comment on Language Log here.

Demand for elocution lesson soars

According to a report written by The Tutor Pages, there was a large increase in requests for speech and elocution private tuition in 2011. Elocution was the subject with the highest number of enquiries per tutor (2nd highest was university level statistics). One of the elocution tutors cited in the report said she thought that the film The King's Speech was responsible for the growth in interest, with people thinking that if the king's serious speech impediment could be improved, then their lesser problems could be easily solved too.

 

All sorts of people want to change the way they speak - professionals, those in the media, even religious ministers. Some people want help with presentation skills and public speaking, but the commonest request is to help lose or soften a regional accent. The largest group of people with this request comes from Birmingham and the West Midlands. Many of these people feel they are being discriminated against in their quest for employment or promotion because of their accent. One enquirer said he'd been told he sounded 'thick' or 'like a thug'. However, most people don't want to lose their accent completely, just to tone it down and make themselves easier to understand.

 

Another large number of people approaching the tutorial agency are professionals from overseas who want to acquire a 'posh' accent. Joanna Lumley has been specifically mentioned as a role model (if you don't know what Joanna Lumley sounds like, click here).

 

Parents often approach The Tutor Pages with the aim of getting their teenage children to speak differently, and snobbism is often apparent in some of the quotes in the report. One Cheshire parent was horrified because his or her son had developed an 'irritating Scouse accent', another was horrified when his or her daughter moved from a private to a state school and the girl's accent changed.

 

Elocution lessons were quite common when I was a young child (I never had them, but at secondary school we had speech and drama classes, which were similar, I suppose). Elocution then fell out of favour for several decades, but seemingly it's in fashion again. Elocution was never considered a traditional academic subject, and even now I notice in the profiles of the tutors in The Tutor Pages report, that most have a singing or acting background, not one in phonetics and linguistics.

 

Here's the report from The Tutor Pages (in pdf format).

How do you pronounce 2012?

Happy New Year everyone, and all the best for 2012. But how do you say 2012? It was still quite common to hear 'two thousand and eleven' during the past year, but it is my guess that you won't hear 'two thousand and twelve' very much this year. Instead, most people will say 'twenty twelve' - in the UK, anyway.

 

We tend to pronounce things in a way that 'sounds right'. And how are we to know that it's right? We get our cues mostly from what we hear. The BBC seems to have made the decision over a year ago to go for the 'twenty ten/eleven/twelve' pronunciation (although certainly last year a sizeable number of their guest interviewees said 'two thousand and eleven') and the BBC is a very influential organisation. Most of us have heard the phrase or slogan London 'Twenty Twelve' Olympics thousands of times over the last year or so, and are hearing it even more often now, so that, too, is ensuring that 'twenty twelve' just sounds more natural than 'two thousand and twelve'.

 

Indeed, one might wonder why we are having this discussion at all. We say without thinking 'ten sixty six' for 1066, and would say 'nineteen twelve' for 1912, never 'nineteen hundred and twelve' or 'one thousand nine hundred and twelve'. We always say 'eighteen-oh-one' and 'nineteen-oh-two', yet when we came to 2001, most people did not follow the previous pattern (twenty-oh-one) but said 'two thousand and one'. This is possibly because we were already familiar with the phrase 'two thousand and one' as a result of the very influential science fiction film 2001: A Space Odyssey (indeed, we'd had over thirty years to get used to the phrase as the film came out in 1968).

 

So, a Happy Twenty Twelve to everyone!

Homophenes

I'm enjoying reading Deaf Sentence by David Lodge, which I mentioned in yesterday's post, but apart from the enjoyment, I'm also learning a lot. Like what a homophene is, for instance. Yes, that's homophene with an e, not homophone, although if you google it, Google will assume you mean homophone (a word pronounced the same as another, but with a different meaning - like rain, rein and reign) and show you those results.

 

A homophene is defined by the OED as "a word that looks the same as another during vocal articulation" and they are described by Lodge as "words which look alike on the lips but have a different meaning, like mark, park and bark, or white, right and quite". Other homophenes would be fail/veil, din/tin and sap/zap.

 

The prefix homo- is from the Greek meaning 'the same'. The -phone of homophone is from the Greek for 'sound', and the -phene of homophene is from the Greek meaning 'to show' or 'to appear'.

Pronunciation of Abramovich

Roman Abramovich, owner of Chelsea FC, has been involved in a court case over the past week or so, so has featured in many radio news bulletins recently. His name is pronounced in different ways by different people. The correct pronunciation is AbramOvich, with the stress on the O. This pronunciation applies when Abramovich is a surname, I believe. The -ovich suffix in Russian, however, more often denotes a patronymic, or a Russian's middle name that derives from his father's first name (the female equivalent is -ovna). Abramovich can thus also be a patronymic as well as a surname, in which case it means that the person's father was called Abram. Abramovich as a patronymic is pronounced AbrAmovich, with the stress on the second A (and for some reason, this is the pronunciation that seems to come more naturally to radio newsreaders). Roman Abramovich's patronymic is Arkadievich, which means that his father's first name is or was Arkadii. Roman, by the way, is pronounced with the stress on the A.

Greek haircut

I keep reading about 'haircuts' in the eurozone, so looked up what a haircut means in the financial world. This definition, from the online Farlex Financial Dictionary , is a bit too technical for me: "The reduction of value to securities used as collateral in a margin loan. That is, when one places securities as collateral, the brokerage making the loan treats them as being worth less than they actually are, so as to give itself a cushion in case its market price decreases."

 

Wikipedia's definition is a bit easier to understand: "In finance, a haircut is a percentage that is subtracted from the market value of an asset that is being used as collateral. The size of the haircut reflects the perceived risk associated with holding the asset. However, the lender has a lien for the entirety of the asset". (A lien, according to the OED, is "a right to retain possession of property (whether land, goods, or money) until a debt due in respect of it to the person detaining it is satisfied". The word 'lien', which dates back to the 16th century, comes originally from the Latin ligamen, bond. Interestingly, the OED draws attention to the different US and British pronunciations of the word lien; it tells us that the usual English pronunciation is, in IPA symbols, /ˈliːən/ ie 'lee-en', where the 'en' sounds like the final syllable of 'fasten', whilst the American pronunciation is /liːn/, which sounds more like 'lean'. I've just checked on howjsay.com, which seems to recognise that I am based in the UK, and it confirms the British pronunciation - you might get a different version if you are in North America.)

 

An article in The Guardian's Pass Notes series simplifies the concept of financial haircuts for non-economists like me; it describes a haircut as "a euphemism for 'disguising the effects of massive fiscal irresponsibility'. 'Taking a haircut' refers to the practice of banks being forced to write down the value of debts they hold, owed by people who can't pay, to avoid the collapse of the entire credit system."

The pronunciation of Cadogan and of other London names

My daughter was telling me about a concert she'd been to in Cadogan Hall, only the conversation was more about the correct pronunciation of Cadogan than the music. The correct pronunciation is Caduggan (with the stress on the 'dug'). The Cadogan family members are, and always have been, very wealthy Chelsea landowners.

 

By coincidence, there was an article on the Londonist website today about the pronunciation of some difficult London place names. The Bois of Theydon Bois in Essex is not pronounced the French way, as in Bois (bwah) de Boulogne, but as Boyce or Boyz. The L of Hainault is pronounced, but the L of Holborn is not. Although many of us say the mall of shopping mall like 'moll', the road in central London the Mall is pronounced to rhyme with 'pal', as is Pall Mall. The W of Greenwich, Woolwich, Southwark and Chiswick is silent (although we pronounce the W of Gatwick Airport and of Aldwych). The P of Deptford is usually not pronounced.

 

There is disagreement among commentators on the article about the pronunciation of Plaistow in east London. I've heard 'Plarse-toe', and that's what some of the commentators say, but others say 'Play-stow'.

 

Here's the article, with some informative comments.

Tongue-twister in the Scottish football league

I was amused by one of the letters in today’s Times concerning some tricky pronunciation (sent in by Mr Antony Edmonds of Hampshire). This is it:

Sir, like many Englishmen, I study the Scottish second division football results for one reason only – to see if East Fife played Forfar, and if so, what the score was.
    The holy grail, of course, is Forfar 4, East Fife 5. The closest to this that has ever been achieved is Forfar 5, East Fife 4, on April 22, 1964.
    However, last Saturday’s result – East Fife 4, Forfar 3 – did give us ‘Forfar Fifers’ the opportunity for some minor celebration.

Pity the poor football scores announcer who has to read out the results!

Greenwich Mean Time

Greenwich Mean Time is not the world's time. So said Dr Felicitas Arias, director of time at the International Bureau of Weights and Measures, on the Today programme this morning (listen again here). GMT has been a standard in Britain since 1847, but since 1972 most of the world has operated on Co-ordinated Universal Time (UTC). Apparently GMT is not accurate enough, nor is it uniform, since it reflects the speed of rotation of the Earth, and the Earth rotates at varying rates. Atomic clocks, on which UTC is based, are more accurate.

 

I must say that I've noticed that there is often confusion if GMT is used when I am talking to someone in another country. Until I knew better, I found that someone elsewhere would agree to Skype me at a certain time -- 14:00 GMT, for instance -- but, in fact, we were often an hour out and never got to speak. That is because many people think that GMT is the current time in the United Kingdom. It isn't. The time in the UK at the moment is currently GMT+1; we call it British Summer Time. We put the clocks back at the end of this month and we will be on GMT again over the winter.

 

The OED gives four pronunciations for Greenwich: /ˈgrɛnɪtʃ/ (Grennitch) , /ˈgrɪnɪtʃ/ (Grinnitch), /ˈgrɛnɪdʒ/ (Grennidzh), and /ˈgrɪnɪdʒ/ (Grinnidzh). It gives the US pronunciation as /ˈgrɛnɪtʃ/ (Grennitch), the same as the first of the four UK pronunciations. The pronunciation of Green... as 'grin...' is more old-fashioned, I think.

 

For the interview with the director of the International Bureau of Weights and Measures, click here.