Inanimate ‘Guy’ in American Dialects

Posted on July 7, 2012 by Ben

Frying PanThe last time I discussed the word ‘guy,’ a generic term meaning ‘man,’ I mentioned a rather fascinating way in which the word has evolved in American dialects. ‘Guy’ has come to become synonymous, in some situations, with ‘thing.’ For example, rather than asking someone to pass the frying pan, you might ask,

‘Could you pass me that guy over there?’

This strikes me as fairly unusual. I don’t believe anyone in the UK refers to everyday objects like frying pans or table lamps as ‘blokes.’ So how did ‘guy’ come to mean ‘thing?’

‘Guy’ is not the first word referring to humans that came to refer to non-sentient beings, of course. One might cite a similar use of ‘girl‘ (imagine a man trying to start his car in the wintertime, sighing in frustration, ‘the old girl’s on her last legs). But using ‘guy’ to refer to things seems much more common.

I wasn’t able to wrangle much in terms of research on the topic (even an unambiguous Google search such as “use of ‘guy’ to refer to inanimate objects” wasn’t helpful). So I’ll offer my own personal perspective on the matter. When I’m putting a way dishes, and ask my wife (in reference to a plate):

Where does this guy go?

…it’s reasonable to ask why I choose ‘guy’ rather than ‘thing,’ or merely ask ‘where does this go?’ For me, ‘guy’ adds a certain emphasis: I am talking about this thing, in my hand, right now.

Furthermore, ‘guy’ feels like more of an appropriate substitute for ‘plate.’ The word ‘thing,’ to me, refers more to something which I can’t classify. So, for example, if I were asking where to put the strange lemon-juicing device we have in our drawer, I might ask ‘where does this thing go?’ But for something as common as a plate, the use of ‘thing’ feels odd. And so I go with ‘guy.’

Anyone else out there who use ‘guy’ in this way?

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How George Washington Spoke (Brief Thoughts)

Posted on July 4, 2012 by Ben

George WashingtonIt’s the Fourth of July, the day when we Americans celebrate our nation’s independence from Britain. To celebrate (sort of), I am going to watch the HBO miniseries John Adams.

At the time of the series’ release, I was intrigued by a quote from actor David Morse, who portrays George Washington. Discussing the accent he used for Washington in an interview with The Onion AV Club, he explained:

The accent back then was probably nothing like what we think of as a Southern accent now or a New England accent now, so we tried to find the root of the accents. For Washington, it was a little bit of Cornwall, that western country English accent with a trace of farmer.

Here is a brief clip of Morse as Washington (He starts speaking at :38).

I enjoy Morse’s accent here, regardless of its strict accuracy. He gives us a hint of West Country (particularly those hard r’s), while maintaining the sense that Washington’s language was part of an earlier step in the evolution of American speech*.

Would there have been a West Country influence on the speech of colonial Virginia? The question is somewhat irrelevant, since most of 17th- and 18th-Century Southern England would probably sound rather ‘West Country’ to a contemporary Englishman. Outside of East Anglia, rhoticity would have been widespread, while the vowel in ‘kite’ would have had a more ‘raised’ pronunciation. Both features are typical of West Country English today. And these features were no doubt brought to the New World.

There is plenty of contemporary evidence that Virginia (or at least parts of Virginia) once had something of a ‘brogue’-like accent. Isolated islands off the coast still betray the influence of a West-Country like progenitor (note my earlier discussion of the accent of Tangier Island). Then there is Virginia’s ‘Tidewater raising,’ a similar situation to Canadian Raising whereby the vowel in words like ‘mouth’ is raised before voiceless consonants (so that ’bout’ may sound a bit like ‘boat’).

None of this is new, but it’s interesting to see an actor adopt an accent that reflects this history. I certainly prefer to the ‘Mid-Atlantic’ British-ish speech typical of so many actors portraying Washington!

*I should really give credit to John Adams’ dialect coach, Catherine Charlton.

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Where did ‘Aye’ go?

Posted on July 1, 2012 by Ben

What is the status of ‘aye?’ General impressions suggest that ‘aye’ means ‘yes’ in Scotland, a chunk of Northern England, and presumably Northern Ireland. But beyond that, the picture of where the word is spoken, and even where it was spoken in the past, gets fuzzy.

Aye (usually spelled ‘ay’) was clearly Shakespeare‘s preferred affirmative. Looking through the excellent concordance at Open Source Shakespeare, you’ll find a striking ratio: ‘aye’ or ‘ay’ occur 788 times in the Bard’s work, ‘yes’ or ‘yea’ a mere 413. Clearly, London audiences would have been familiar with the term.

Yet we shouldn’t draw conclusions about how Elizabethan Londoners would have actually spoken. ‘Thou,’ after all, is a trademark of ‘Shakespearean’ English, even though it mayve have receded in London by that time*. Was ‘aye’ simply a theatrical convention? Unfortunately, 16th-Century English printing was not prolific, so it’s not a question one can answer without looking through a vast body of extremely old texts.

What I can say is that London is definitely not ‘aye’ territory these days, and hasn’t been for ages. In fact, it didn’t seem to be at the time when London printing took up speed in the early 18th Century. Using Google Books to go through old newspapers, you’ll find that ‘yes’ almost always outweighed ‘aye’ in this period. For example, in an 1739 issue of the London newspaper The Spectator, ‘yes’ occurs 62 times. For ‘aye,’ that number is only 10.

And what about America? Outside of perhaps the ‘ayuh’ of remote rural New England, ‘aye’ is nowhere to be found on American soil**. But was it ever? Perhaps somewhere. But I would note that in the transcripts of the Salem Witch Trials, ‘aye’ is not used once. (‘Yes’ was patently the preferred affirmative). That would indirectly suggest that ‘aye’ had most likely waned a good deal in Southern England over the course of the 17th-Century.

That being said, there is an exceptional use of ‘aye’ that occurred in American military speech well into the 20th-Century. That would be ‘aye aye,’ a rote response to superior officers. Why this archaic (in America) term became a staple of military discourse is perplexing, but you can find it in any number of accounts of military life, such as Ron Kovic’s Vietnam Memoir Born on the Fourth of July:

And then he shouted, “Ready–mount!” And they shouted back, “Ready–mount! Aye aye, sir! And all eighty jumped into bed, still standing at attention, lying in their racks.

These are all very rough observations. Are any readers out there ‘aye’ speakers? And how is the word faring in the 21st-Century?

*See U of Toronto’s Cheratra Yaswen’s article on this subject for a more detailed look at the topic.

**Except maybe in dialects that are not contiguous with the spectrum of North American speech, such as those of the Outer Banks and Newfoundland.

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The Goose Room and the Foot Room

Posted on June 27, 2012 by Ben
Bedroom

Photo: Tim Collins

Some differences in pronunciation cross traditional dialect boundaries. One such curio is the word ‘room,’ which has two common variants: one with the vowel in ‘goose,’ and the other with the ‘lax’ vowel in ‘foot.’

I use the vowel in ‘goose’ myself, but I’ve heard many New Englanders opt for the vowel in ‘foot.’ Connoisseurs of British Received Pronunciation might note a similar pronunciation in older varieties of RP. Another example of New England’s linguistic connection to old England? Not quite. In the Harvard Dialect Survey from some years back, participants claimed to pronounce ‘room’ with the ‘foot’ vowel in Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and many other American cities.

The HDS survey also inquires about other ‘roo-‘ words: ‘root,’ ‘roof,’ and ‘broom.’ Many respondents claimed to pronounce these with the ‘foot’ vowel as well. It seems safe to say that, once upon a time, ‘roo-‘ words belonged to the same class as ‘foot,’ ‘would,’ ‘could,’ and ‘book.’ Why ‘roo’ words switched vowels where those other words didn’t is something I can’t answer.

Similar questions have been posed on the other side of the Atlantic. A few years back, John Wells noted on his blog that British ‘room’ had been shifting from the ‘foot’ vowel to the ‘room’ vowel for some time:

In the 1956 edition of EPD (and perhaps earlier — I haven’t checked), Daniel Jones, while still prioritizing the FOOT vowel on this word, commented, “Note.—The use of the variant ruːm appears to be much on the increase.” This suggests that previously it had been unusual. I conclude that in the 1920s rʊm would have been the more usual pronunciation in RP.

(Earlier in the post, Wells notes that the rate seems to be 81% of Britons favoring the ‘goose’ vowel as of 1988).

Are there any conclusions we can make about how these two pronunciations might align with particular dialects? As Wells suggests, the ‘foot’ pronunciation of ‘room’ seems older, so one would expect it to correlate with age. As for American English, I have noticed the ‘foot’ pronunciation more frequently in working-class speakers (the two memories that spring to mind most readily are those of a strongly accent Boston priest and Chicago police officer.)

Beyond these tentative connections, however, this seems to be one of those wonderful exceptions in which pronunciation transcends region.

******

Apropos of the above citation: John C. Wells, a brilliant phonetician and one of linguistics’ most insightful bloggers, is currently recovering from a minor stroke. I wish him the speediest of recoveries.

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British ‘LOT’, 2012

Posted on June 24, 2012 by Ben

The last post inspired a brief debate in the comments section about the LOT vowel (i.e. the ‘o’ in ‘not,’ ‘Todd,’ and ‘rot’) in contemporary British English. The question, it seems, is whether this sound has shifted closer to the vowel space more traditional to the vowel in THOUGHT.

Like most questions of this type, it really depends on the dialect. So I’ll turn to a study I occasionally use when comparing individual vowels in different regions: Ferragne and Pellegrino’s Formant Frequencies of Vowels in 13 Accents of the British Isles, which compares acoustic analyses of various accents of the contemporary UK.

I won’t regale you with a lecture about acoustic analysis, other than to say that phoneticians often use what are called ‘formant frequencies’ to make deductions about the relative position of vowels. Long story short, if a vowel has a higher ‘F1‘ (first formant frequency), it roughly suggests a more open vowel, while a lower F1 suggests a more close vowel.

With this rather crude explanation in mind, let’s take a look at the F1 numbers for the LOT vowel in different British accents according to Ferragne and Pellegrino’s study:

Scottish Highlands 439
Glasgow 530
London 552
Cornwall 556
Birmingham 576
Hull 578
East Anglia 580
Newcastle 591
Liverpool 599
Lancaster 615

This list is not terribly surprising. The closest pronunciations of LOT are found in Scotland, which makes sense: many have noted that some Scottish accents feature a LOT vowel fairly close to the pure [o] of Spanish todo. Also unsurprising is that the three most open pronunciations of LOT are in the North of England, where I’ve noticed that this vowel doesn’t seem to have shifted upward much.

The ‘London’ accent (which the researchers label ‘Standard Southern English‘), definitely has a LOT vowel that appears closer to [ɔ] (the vowel more traditionally associated with RP THOUGHT) than [ɒ]. That being said, it’s a little unclear to me who represents the Londoners in this study. ‘Standard Southern English’ seems to be equated with contemporary Received Pronunciation but there are some vagaries in terms of what accents fall under that category.

I’m hesitant to make any conclusions, but roughly speaking, these numbers suggests that the LOT vowel is most open in Northern England, most close in Scotland, and somewhere in between in the South. Although I’m sure there is tremendous variation in the pronunciation of individual speakers.

*Source: Ferragne, E., & Pellegrino, F. (2010). Formant frequencies of 13 accents of the British Isles. Journal of the International Phonetic Association, 40, 1-34.

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Canadian Vowels vs. California Vowels

Posted on June 21, 2012 by Ben
Keanu Reeves

Photo: Michael Labowicz

Canadians and Californians share more than a few passing similarities, speech-wise. After all, it didn’t take much suspension of disbelief to buy Canadian Keanu Reeves as a Valley native in Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure. (L.A. natives would probably disagree with my appraisal).

In both accents, the vowel in ‘dress’ tends to shift toward the vowel in ‘trap,’ the vowel in ‘trap’ tends to move toward the vowel in ‘lot’, while ‘lot’ merges with the vowel in ‘thought.’ As I’ve frequently discussed, this means that when a Californian says:

My pet cat Rod.

It might sound to someone from Chicago* like:

My pat cot rawed.

And yet something has always puzzled me about the parallel shifts in Canada and California: why does the shift seem so widespread in Canada, but more inconsistent in the Golden State?

A recent article in American Speech (the academic journal of The American Dialect Society) explores this very question. Robert Kennedy and James Grama’s Chain Shifting and Centralization in California Vowels: An Acoustic Analysis studied the speech of thirteen subjects from both Southern and Northern California.

The results confirmed my impressions: In California, the vowel in DRESS consistently moves toward TRAP, and the vowel in TRAP consistently moves toward the vowel in LOT. But the subjects were split nearly in half when it came to the vowel in LOT. Some retracted this vowel, so that it is (presumably) fairly close to the ‘standard’ British pronunciation of the word: [ɒ]. Others kept it more or less in the same position it is for most Americans, as an unrounded and fairly central ‘ah’ sound.

The range of variation of this one vowel indeed strikes me as remarkable. Some Angelenos conform to the ‘Valley Girl‘ stereotype of pronouncing such words with a back-rounded vowel (hence the stereotypical ‘Oh my gawwd’). Yet I’ve heard others pronounce it almost as one would in Chicago: [ä].

So what is it about California English that is more resistant to shifting the ‘o’ in ‘lot’? Is it (as Kennedy and Grama suggest) a matter of the two shifts being precipitated by the movement of different vowels? Or are there external factors that result in California maintaining the more ‘typical’ American vowel?

Source: Kennedy, R., & Grama, J. (2012). Chain shifting and centralization in California vowels: An acoustic analysis. American Speech, 87(1), 39-56.

*Okay, not quite. The Chicago DRESS vowel is actually usually retracted, and the Chicago TRAP vowel is raised and diphthongized. This is a very rough hypothetical example.

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A New (Rhotic?) Dialect in New Zealand?

Posted on June 18, 2012 by Ben
Sky Tower

Photo: Miguel A. Monjas

Needless to say, I was quite intrigued by this recent article at Stuff.co.nz about a new urban dialect spoken in South Auckland, New Zealand.  A unique type of youthful, urban speech has emerged, not dissimilar to Multicultural British English in terms of its cultural relevance. And curiously, these young Kiwis fully pronounce the /r/ in nurse, world, and pearl (most New Zealand accents are firmly non-rhotic, meaning they drop the r’s in these words).

Seeking corroborating evidence, I found this interview with an Auckland hip hop artist named Savage who definitely pronounces a few more /r/’s than what we think of as typically Kiwi:

Note the ‘strong’ /r/ sound in ‘first’ at :05 in the video, ‘Universal’ at :33, and a smattering of other rhotic pronunciations of ‘first’ in the second half of the interview.

Semi-rhoticity is not the only thing that marks this accent as different. Like Cockney and African American Vernacular English, there is a tendency to render ‘th’ in ‘this’ as a /d/ sound. You also may note that, as is the case with Multicultural British English, the diphthongs in ‘face’ and ‘kite’ tend to be a more ‘conservative’ (that is, the ‘i’ in ‘kite’ hasn’t shifted as much toward the ‘oy’ in ‘boy’ and the ‘a’ in ‘face’ hasn’t shifted as much toward ‘kite.’)

The original article makes a comparison that won’t make much sense to non-Kiwis: Like teenage South Auckland speech, the Southland Burr spoken on the South Island of New Zealand is rhotic. But I doubt there’s any connection between the two; it’s only in a country as ‘r-less’ as NZ that one might see a link between these two entirely different accents.

So where does the South Auckland /r/ come from? One obvious (but tired) explanation is that they pick up the sound from American media. If so, this would be one of the few places in the world where America has managed to change an accent from non-rhotic to rhotic via the airwaves. After all, Britain is far more exposed to American TV than it was 50 years ago while being a far more non-rhotic country than it was fifty years ago.

That being said, this subculture of South Auckland seems to have a stronger than average connection to American hip hop. If you watch this Savage music video, you’ll notice he raps in fairly fluent African-American Vernacular English rather than any kind of New Zealand-specific ethnolect. And notably, his pattern of rhoticity is similar to that of AAVE, with the ‘r’ in stressed syllables like ‘nurse’ pronounced, but the ‘r’ in unstressed syllables like the ‘er’ in ‘butter’ not.

Any thoughts on the origins of this new /r/?

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Whatever Happened to the Northumbrian /r/?

Posted on June 15, 2012 by Ben

Thomas Girtin's Bamburgh CastleAs I’ve previously discussed, English accents exhibit various types of /r/ sounds. Yet few are as peculiar as the /r/ once typical of an accent known as the Northumbrian burr, spoken in rural areas of Northeast England.

The burr was notorious for its uvular /r/ sound, similar to the /r/ in Metropolitan French or Standard German. To put that into impressionistic terms, it was a ‘swallowed’ r, pronounced from the back of the throat.

The burr is clearly audible in this old recording made for the Survey of English dialects in the 1950’s (courtesy of the British Library).

[more…]

Where did this strangely ‘continental’ /r/ come from? What makes this region so unique that from its villages would emerge this most rare of English rhotics? One possible clue can be found in the history of English in the area, as summarized in this passage from a description of Middle English dialects* on the UPenns’s Linguistics Department website:

In the aftermath of the great Scandinavian invasions of the 860’s and 870’s, large numbers of Scandinavian families settled in northern and northeastern England … in some areas their settlements had so completely displaced the preexisting English settlements that they cannot have had sufficient contact with native speakers of Old English to learn the language well. They learned it badly, carrying over into their English various features of Norse…

So it seems there was a stronger-than-usual connection between the English in Northumbria and Old Norse. Those with some knowledge of Scandinavian tongues might see a possible link in that Danish and certain dialects of Swedish and Norwegian feature uvular /r/’s. But in their book Dialectology, linguists JK Chambers and Peter Trudgill posit that the uvular /r/ heard in modern Scandinavian countries actually originated in Paris, and spread from city to city in Western and Northern Europe.

So how the Scandinavian connection might have actually produced the unusual /r/ of the region is anyone’s guess. Nevertheless, it seems that the region was linguistically isolated from the beginning.

As to how the /r/ disappeared, well, that one isn’t so difficult to figure out. The ‘standard’ English alveolar approximant has conquered the traditional trills that were once part of rural English dialects. Although its memory lives on, the Northumbrian burr will most likely never reemerge.

*I’ve yet to find out who the author is of this page, as it’s buried in a largely inaccessible part of the website.

 

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-ness: A Darn Productive Morpheme

Posted on June 10, 2012 by Ben

x-barThe English lexicon contains numerous nouns formed by adding the suffix ‘-ness‘ to an adjective: ‘weakness,’ ‘fullness,’ ‘brightness,’ and countless others. And at least in American English, we find creative new uses of ‘-ness’ all the time, which seem to be even more ubiquitous in the digital age.

Indeed, Google is a fantastic tool for testing the sheer productivity of ‘-ness.’ Type in nearly any word you can think of, add -ness, and it seems that someone, somewhere, has used it in a blog post or piece of popular journalism.

Of course, nobody seems to have gotten the memo that ‘-ness’ should be affixed to adjectives. You can find such bizarre neologisms as ‘bookness,’ (28,500 results), ‘roadness‘ (59,200 results), ‘vaseness‘ (admittedly a paltry 671 results, but somebody out there thought of it), and naturally, the self-referential ‘nessness‘ (a robust 275,000 results).

The pertinent question about -ness is why the affix is so popular where others are not. For example, ‘-ity‘ is used in a very similar way, as in ‘originality,’ ‘duality‘ and ‘speciality.’ But where somebody might walk into a cool bookstore and exclaim ‘holy bookness!’ you aren’t likely to hear as many uses of ‘holy bookity!’

To illustrate one reason why ‘-ity‘ may be less popular, take an example of a rare productive use of -ity, in this (probable) ad-lib from Steve Carell on the American version of The Office:

Your gayness does not define you. Your Mexican-ness is what defines you, to me. And I think we should celebrate Oscar’s Mexicanity.

Besides its humor value, my guess is that Carell uses ‘Mexicanity’ because the previously used ‘Mexicanness’ is awkward, phonetically-speaking. (The syllabic /n/ in Mexican is  followed by syllable-initial /n/). Less apparent from the above quote is the way that Carell pronounces the word: mɛksɪˈkænɪti, so that -can- sounds just like the word ‘can.’ He notable falters in trying to find the right stress pattern.

This exemplifies a major deficit of -ity: it typically changes the pronunciation of the word’s base. ‘-Ness,’ by contrast,  can be added to pretty much anything (‘1982 Chevy Camaroness!’) without any altered vowels, consonants or accented syllables. You don’t have to think about where to put the stress in, say, ‘awesome-ity‘ or which vowel to use in the 2nd syllable of ‘Russianity‘ (to mirror Carell’s example).

The point being, ‘-ness’ is one heck of a productive affix. Does it have any competition? I’m thinking maybe the trend (recently identified by the American Dialect Society) of adding ‘-sauce,’ as in ‘awesomesauce.’ But that seems years away from reaching, uh, ‘ness’ levels of productivity.

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Poor Dick’s Profane Conversion

Posted on June 7, 2012 by Ben

English-speakers have a unique way of appropriating everyday words to describe sex. From sports to farm animals to botany, we have a vast trove of erotic symbolism at our disposal. One of the stranger of these conversions is that of Dick, which to this day remains a nickname for ‘Richard.’ Where other terms for genitalia make a certain metaphorical sense, Dick is, well, just a man’s name, evocative of little intrinsically phallic imagery.

Like so many profanities, this one appears to have been popularized via the military, as the Online Etymology Dictionary suggests:

The meaning “penis” is attested from 1891 in British army slang.

(It’s hardly peculiar that this bit of off-coloredness crossed the ocean and took root in America; fighting a pair of world wars together has a way of fostering the international exchange of vulgarity.)

I can’t say for sure how ‘Dick’ became ‘dick,’ but its trajectory doesn’t seem that hard to put together. The word has long been slang for ‘fellow‘ in British English, and given how people tend to anthropomorphize certain body parts, it’s not much of a leap to make.

What I find somewhat mysterious about the word, though, is that up until at least my parent’s generation, Dick was still perfectly acceptable as a truncation of Richard. (It still is acceptable, of course, although it strikes me as very rare for any American to go by Dick among those born after 1975 or so.) The word is perhaps unique in the English lexicon in that it is an unremarkable man’s name in one sense, and a crude epithet in another*. Hence it’s possible for a mother to scold her son by saying …

“Dick! Don’t ever say that word again!”

…when the ‘word’ in question is the poor boy’s own name.

In many ways, I think ‘dick’ has lost its punch. This can perhaps be attributed to the word further evolving to be a rather innocuous synonym of ‘jerk,’ as in the complaint “Stop acting like a dick!” I recall being (very slightly) shocked when the word was used this way in the late-90s TV drama Felicity, a show with a largely teenage audience. Such is the comparative mildness of the term when you divorce it from its sexual connotation.

Is this is yet another curse word enjoying a banal retirement?

*’Epithet’ is the operative word here. ‘Dick’ is used descriptively in a way that ‘Johnson’ or ‘Peter’ really aren’t.

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