The virtual linguist

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.

How to spell and pronounce 'mouth'

"I'm not sure if I've spelt 'mouth' correctly", wrote a colleague in an email asking me to proofread a short text she'd written. Strange question from a highly educated editor? No, actually a very understandable question. She was using 'mouth' as a verb and, because the 'th' of the verb 'to mouth' is pronounced like the sound 'th' in the, this or either (/ð/is the phonetic symbol), she wondered whether 'mouth' had an 'e' at the end, like similar noun-verb pairs where the 'th' of the noun is pronounced like the 'th' of thing, thin or thirst (phonetic symbol /θ/), but the verb form adds an 'e' and the pronunciation changes to /ð/: teeth/teethe, breath/breathe, cloth/clothe, sheath/sheathe, wreath/wreathe.

 

Mouth is unusual in that the noun doesn't add an 'e' to become a verb, yet the pronunciation of the 'th' changes. I can't think of any other noun-verb pair that is the same. Smooth and to smooth are both pronounced with a /ð/ sound, but then 'smooth' is an adjective, not a noun. Earth and to earth, berth and to berth and froth and to froth have /θ/ in both, but no extra 'e' in the verb form.

Anne Hathaway's Yorkshire accent

Anne Hathaway's accent in her new film One Day has been slated by film critics, although her acting was praised. She plays Emma, who is from Yorkshire, but in the trailer (can be watched here) she says only a few words at a time, so it's hard to hear her. It didn't sound very Yorkshire-like to me, I must say.

 

The Village Voice describes her accent as 'dodgy' and 'hodgepodge', Total Film says her accent goes from 'broad Yorkshire to RP within scenes' and What Culture says her accent is 'all over the place'. More reviews here.

Pronunciation of gooseberry

The presenters of Radio 4's Today programme this morning argued about the correct way to pronounce gooseberry. John Humphrys said something like 'guzz-berry', while Sarah Montague had a long 'oo' sound as in 'zoo'. I pronounce it like Sarah. But the OED uses the shorter vowel sound when transcribing the pronunciation, pronounced like the 'oo' in foot or wood. Several online dictionaries eg Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary have this pronunciation (British English), too. The American English pronunciation on this site has a long 'oo'. Howjsay has the longer vowel sound, as in cool.

Super-accents

England will be dominated by a few 'super-accents' within 40 years, according to this recent Daily Mail report, which quotes research undertaken at the University of Lancaster. In particular, in the north of England, Geordie, or the dialect spoken in the north-east around Newcastle and Sunderland, is set to make inroads into Cumbria in the north-west.

 

Geordie is spreading outside its traditional area thanks to celebrities such as Ant and Dec, and Cheryl Cole, who speak it. In the south of England it is the London accent that is spreading into the home counties, as people move out of the capital. Professor Paul Kerswill of Lancaster University predicts that the London dialect will be a multi-cultural one within 40 years, influenced by London's Caribbean and Asian communities. As it is now, it is fashionable among young people who have never been anywhere near the Caribbean to speak so-called Jafaican ie fake Jamaican.

 

Here's the Mail article.

War Horse on Broadway

The successful British play War Horse has transferred to Broadway. It's an American cast and they are speaking in British accents - mainly West Country. On the Radio 4 Today programme on Saturday (listen for a couple more days here) there was an interview with the voice coach Barbara Berkery (who wasn't involved with War Horse but she trained Gwyneth Paltrow for Shakespeare in Love and Renee Zellweger for Bridget Jones's Diary).

 

One of the actors said they had had voice and sound exercises - things like 'how now brown cow'. Barbara Berkery said the key thing was plenty of time -- she spent five intensive weeks with Renee Zellweger. She said that anyone in theory could learn another accent but actors are easier to teach because they are used to adopting different voices and personae. Many ordinary people resist any attempt or pressure to change their accent because the voice is so fundamental to identity; these people use their accent as a barrier to maintain an 'us and them' situation. Other people adapt their accent if they move to another area or mix with people from other parts of the country.

 

Here's the short BBC piece.

English accents and the US

Cheryl Cole is very popular in the UK and, for that reason, the Geordie accent has become well liked too, with companies often choosing to site their call centres on Tyneside in the north-east of England. Cheryl Cole is planning to appear on The X Factor in the States, and there are reports that she has been taking speaking lessons to prepare for it (eg in this BBC article). The problem is that Americans may not understand her, because they are not very familiar with a Geordie accent. According to this BBC article Americans can really only understand two British English accents - standard Received Pronunciation, and a Cockney accent provided it's not too pronounced (perhaps they've been taking lessons from Dick Van Dyke in Mary Poppins!).

 

Voice coach Marina Tyndall advises Cheryl Cole not to tone down her distinctive Newcastle accent too much for US viewers, as she risks alienating her fan base in this country if she does so. Instead Tyndall advises Cole to break longer sentences into shorter 'chunks' with plenty of pauses to allow listeners more time to understand and to use more facial expressions and changes of pitch.

 

Here's the full article on the BBC website.

Forensic acoustics

There was an interesting 15-minute programme on Radio 4 a couple of days ago about forensic acoustics (listen here for a few days more; thanks to Chris for sending me the link). Professor Peter French of York University was talking about some of the criminal cases he had been involved with.

 

In the late 1970s during a long hunt for the so-called Yorkshire Ripper, who murdered thirteen women and attacked several others, West Yorkshire police were led on a wild goose chase by tape recordings purportedly sent to them by the murderer. The person on the tape had a Sunderland accent and police put all their eggs into this basket and looked for a man from this locality. The tapes turned out to be hoaxes, but the linguist who had identified the voice as being from a particular region of Sunderland was spot on. On the aforementioned radio programme we heard both the original tape and the same words spoken by the same man twenty years or so later after he had been caught and imprisoned. The voices were still recognisably the same, despite the length of time that had passed and despite the fact that the owner of the voice was a heavy smoker and drinker, factors known to affect the voice.

 

Another murder featured in the programme -- the killer being Richard Garner, who murdered his father Frank. He made a number of phone calls to banks to withdraw money from his father's account but, despite the fact that he tried to disguise his Yorkshire accent, he made numerous slips which gave him away. These recordings featured in the radio programme.

 

Professor French said that the majority of the work of his department these days is to do with terrorism. A few years ago the main thrust of his work was drug crime. He also has a lot to do with the emergency services as he said that, since so many people carry mobile phones these days, and their first impulse is to phone the police, often their own attack and possibly even murder is recorded unwittingly as the line remains open.

 

The programme is available for a few more days here.

The pronunciation of controversy

The traditional pronunciation was CONtroversy, with the stress on the first syllable, but more of us Britons are now saying ConTROversy, according to British Library research. The pronunciation of other words has changed -- schedule is now often pronounced 'skedule' and patriotic pronounced 'pay-triotic'. Those two changes are in line with American pronunciation, but what is interesting about the 'controversy' shift is that ConTROversy is not the American pronunciation, so the change has nothing to do with copying an American accent.

 

Other words have resolutely maintained their British pronunciation -- Britons are showing no interest in pronouncing attitude the American way ('attitood', instead of 'attityude') and are sticking to 'garridge' (garage) rather than the American 'garaahge'. Despite the Gershwin song (You say 'eether' and I say 'eye-ther') there is no Atlantic split between the two pronunciations, with both pronunciations being popular in the US and the UK. 'Scone' is interesting; almost all Americans pronounce it to rhyme with 'bone', but there are two pronunciations in the UK -- to rhyme with 'bone' and to rhyme with 'gone' -- and, as I said in this post, we can get very excited about which is the correct version.

 

For more on this story see this Daily Telegraph article.