A Slither of Justice

Agatha Christie meets Black Mirror. That’s how I would describe a book I just finished listening to, called The 7 1/2 Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle (or curiously, just seven deaths in some editions), by Stuart Turton. As I listened to its denoeument today, I was blown away to hear a pronunciation variant that I learned about only yesterday, in this tweet from Rob Drummond:

The book was narrated by James Cameron Stewart, and in Chapter 59, at about 16:35, he clearly pronounces,

…a slither of justice for Thomas.

I went over to YouGlish.com and searched for sliver and slivers in the UK video clips. I found that at least in that sample, the slither(s) pronunciation occurs about one out of every three times the word sliver(s) is used: 15 to 21, out of a total of 36 examples. The Australian English section has even fewer samples, but the ratio is about similar: slither(s) three out of eight pronunciations that I was able to hear clearly. I also checked for slither spelled as such, and found six more examples, among the clips with slither used as a verb. I even found a couple of “uncorrected” spellings, where the pronunciation was actually sliver, but the transcript had slither!

In the US section, I found one example of sliver pronounced as slither out of the first dozen or so I listened to, but the total hits here were almost 400, so I didn’t try to hear them all.

The “th” sound that you get in slither, as well as in many function words such as this, that, these, those, they, them, and the is written as [ð] in the International Phonetic Alphabet. The other “th” sound, heard in words such as thick, thin, think, and throne as written as [θ]. Linguists refer to the pronunciation of /ð/ as [v] (for example, bruvver for brother) and /f/ as [θ] (such as fink for think) as “TH fronting”; note the hashtag in Drummond’s tweet. This is because instead of the tip of the tongue touching the front teeth, the action is further forward in the mouth, with the (upper) front teeth touching the (lower) lip.

However, this slither for sliver pronunciation goes in the opposite direction. This is typically what you’d expect when someone is trying to change an aspect of their speech that is stigmatized, and ends up overshooting; it’s called hypercorrection. In this case, it would mean someone trying to erase their TH-fronting, and then turning all their /v/ sounds into [ð]. I don’t know if that’s what’s going on here, since I’m not even close to being familiar enough with the sociolinguistics of British English pronunciation to make the call. Lynne Murphy doesn’t think it is, and on reflection, if it really were hypercorrection, then by now I’d expect to have read in the comment threads add-on observations about speakers who pronounce words like river and even with [ð].

For more about TH-fronting, check out this 2011 post from DialectBlog.

Grover and the Excellent Idea

It’s been called “the new Laurel vs. Yanny“: A six-second video clip from Sesame Street in which Grover expresses his enthusiastic approval for an idea that a fellow Muppet named Rosita suggests. In case you haven’t already read what people are hearing Grover say, I’ll let you listen to it before I bring in the spoilers. Here’s a clip of just the audio. Further commentary below the fold.

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Some Phonetic N-L-ysis (Or, You’ll Want to Hold Your Nose for This One)

In doing pronunciation tutoring for international students, I’ve found one pronunciation error to be particularly difficult for students to overcome. The specific problem, which I’ve noticed most often in students from Hubei, China, is in making a distinction between /n/ and /l/. Sometimes, /l/ is the troublesome member of the pair. When they pronounce it, it sounds like an /n/, so when they deliver a mock lecture for a teaching assessment, they might pronounce analysis as ananasis. Other times, /n/ is the source of the trouble, when not comes out as lot, or no as low, or my knife as my life.

This phonemic merger has happened despite the existence of common Chinese names such as Liu. One student admitted that it can sometimes be a problem to say words like these, and sometimes people from his home region will be teased for it when they travel to other areas of China. Apparently this local dialect, even though it’s a variety of Mandarin, is known to be difficult for other Mandarin speakers to understand. I imagine American English speakers with the cot/caught merger have a similar experience when traveling to a region where the speakers still make a distinction between these two vowels.

Working with speakers who are struggling to distinguish between /n/ and /l/ highlights how phonetically similar they are. First of all, they’re both made by putting the tip of your tongue behind your top front teeth, on that bony bump behind them (the alveolar ridge). Furthermore, they’re both voiced sounds. Make an extended /n/ sound or an extended /l/ sound and put a finger on your Adam’s apple. For both sounds, you’ll feel the vibrations of the air being pushed through your vocal folds.

So exactly what is the difference between /n/ and /l/, anyway? It comes down to two things:

  1. Does the air pass through the nose? That is, are you making a nasal sound?
  2. Does the air pass over the sides of the tongue? That is, are you making a lateral sound?

So how do you know if air is coming through your nose or past the sides of your tongue? Take a deep breath, put your tongue into position for your /n/ or /l/, whichever one you’re trying to make, and say that sound for a good, long time: [nnnnnn….], or [lllll…]. I’m assuming that you’re able to do this, since you’re probably an English speaker if you’re reading this blog. However, in the unlikely event that you were not able to make that extended [n] or [l], then that means the answer to both of these questions is NO, which means you’re not making an [n] or an [l] at all; you’re making a different alveolar sound: [d]!

But supposing you were able to make that extended [n] or [l], here’s the next part of the test. Do it again, and this time do it while pinching your nose. Were you still able to do it? If pinching your nose totally disrupted things, then air must have been coming through there before, so the answer to the “nasal” question is YES.

On the other hand, if pinching your nose didn’t stop you at all, then air must have been escaping your head some other way, and it probably wasn’t coming out your ears. I mean, I guess it could have, if you get lots of ear infections like I did when I was a kid, and you’ve had tubes inserted into your eardrums. But still, it’s a bit of work to force air to go through there. The more likely escape path is past the sides of your tongue. To find out for sure, put your tongue into the position again, and then just breathe through your mouth for a little bit. You should feel the sides of your tongue is getting cold. So the answer to the “lateral” question is YES.

This means, looking back, that if air was passing through your nose a minute or two ago, and pinching your nose gave it no other way to get out, then it wasn’t just the tip of your tongue making contact with the alveolar ridge. It was actually the entire outer edge of your tongue, from the right all the way to the left, spreading out to seal the passage from your molars on one side, to just behind your incisors, to your molars on the other side. On the other hand, if air was passing over the sides of your tongue, then your tongue was squeezed into a narrow shape, so that only the tip was touching the alveolar ridge.

If the answer to the nasal question is YES and the answer to the lateral question is NO, then you’ve got yourself an [n]. If the answer to the nasal question is NO and the answer to the lateral question is YES, then you’re making an [l]. But what if the answer to both of these questions is YES? In that case, you’re making a sound that isn’t even in English’s phonetic inventory. In fact, there isn’t even an International Phonetic Alphabet symbol for it; the best we can do is to use the [l] symbol and use the tilde (~) to indicate that this is a nasalized consonant: [ l̃ ].

This halfway consonant is usually what the students in question have been making for both /n/ and /l/, leading to the confusion between not and lot; no and low; knife and life.

Here are the differences summed up.

air does not   pass through nose        air passes         through nose
air does not pass  sides of tongue [ d ] [ n ]
air passes sides of tongue [ l ] [ l̃ ]

Once the students are more aware of what’s going on with their speech articulators, it’s a matter of practicing the two sounds, sometimes while pinching their nose to make sure air can’t pass through it unnoticed. When they get good enough at producing the two sounds during our session, they can take on the homework challenge of singing the hook from Roy Orbison’s classic doo-wop tune!

Photogenic People Take the Best Pictures

Now that it’s Adam’s senior year in the marching band, a vinyl poster with a picture of him in uniform is hanging at the football stadium, along with posters of all the other senior band members, cheerleaders, and football players. My wife and I saw it at the first home game, and he looked really good in it. We’d been a little nervous, since Doug had been dissatisfied with how he looked in his senior band picture two years ago. At lunch the next day, my wife said,

Adam, you took a great picture!

“No, he didn’t,” I said. “The photographer took a great picture.”

I was amazed to hear that sentence, because only hours earlier, I had heard a similar sentence from an instructor at the gym. At the end of a class, the instructor was making some small talk with the participants, and she got to telling about how it didn’t matter what she was wearing or how she did her hair,

I take crappy pictures.

It instantly set off my syntactic tripwire: The teacher wasn’t taking the pictures. People with cameras took pictures of her. Yet here she was, making herself the subject of the verb phrase take crappy pictures. I was especially alert for sentences like this because at the time, I’d just finished writing a script for the Grammar Girl podcast (which I’ll link to when Mignon runs it). [UPDATE: Here it is.] One of her listeners had asked about sentences like

This screw screws in easily.

and she’d passed it on to me to see if I could do something with it. I figured it would be a pretty quick piece to write. This kind of sentence is sometimes said to use the middle voice, since it has characteristics of both active voice and passive voice. On the one hand, the verb phrase looks to be in the active voice, with that active verb screws instead of the passive is screwed. On the other hand, the subject is not the do-er of the action (i.e. the agent); it’s the undergoer of the action (i.e. the patient), the hallmark of passive voice. (At least, it’s the hallmark when both an agent and a patient are involved. For verbs like die, which require only a patient, active-voice verb forms are expected.)

In addition to these characteristics, there are a couple of other things that linguists have noticed about these middle-voice sentences. One is that they often don’t refer to a specific event. Of course, sometimes they do, like the sentence talking about that time when the band photographer took a picture of Adam. But a more typical middle-voice sentence would be ones like these:

I don’t embarrass easily.

These cookies freeze well.

Our kit sells for $10.99.

Speakers of these sentences aren’t talking about particular embarrassments, or a specific time when they froze some cookies (even if they’ve done it many times), or all the times that someone paid $11 for their product. These speakers are more focused on saying something about themselves, or the cookies, or the item for sale.

This brings us to the next characteristic of middle-voice sentences: the subject gets the credit or the blame. In a prototypical active-voice sentence, such as

Kim took a picture,

the subject is not only the one taking the action (i.e. the agent), but is also the one exercising their volition. The subject is responsible for this action happening. On the other hand, in the middle-voice sentences, even though the subject isn’t the agent anymore, it is still at least partially responsible for pictures turning out great or crappy, or someone getting embarrassed, or the successful freezing of the cookies.

The third characteristic of middle-voice sentences is that they often have an adverbial element to them. In the example sentences we have easily and well. As with the event-reference tendency, there are exceptions that don’t contain adverbs. I tend to notice them in computer contexts:

Your receipt is printing.

The program is downloading.

And of course, our photography sentences don’t have adverbs. But look closer: Even these sentences manage to convey some idea of how the photographing goes, by modifying picture(s) with the adjectives great and crappy.

I wrote about all these kinds of sentences in the Grammar Girl script except for one: Sentences like You took a great picture and I take crappy pictures. These sentences have something that the others don’t: a direct object! In all the other sentences, this middle-voice construction takes a verb that’s ordinarily transitive and makes it intransitive, but in the two sentences I heard on that Saturday a few weeks ago, the transitive verb take is still transitive, taking the same direct object, picture(s) that it usually does. And instead of pictures becoming the subject, in a sentence like

*These pictures took well,

we have a noun taken from somewhere inside what would have been the direct object in an active sentence. Here, I’ll illustrate:

The photographer took a great picture of Adam.

Adam took a great picture.

The noun Adam is inside the of prepositional phrase, inside the direct object a great picture of Adam. In all the reading I’ve done on middle voice in previous years, and in the more recent reading I did in order to write the Grammar Girl episode, I haven’t come across this kind middle-yet-still-transitive sentence. I’ve tried to think of others, and so far I have only one candidate. It’s make, as in this pair of sentences:

My wife made a fantastic pie from these apples.

These apples would make a great pie.

Other examples, real or imagined, are welcome in the comments.

Clickable IPA

One of the courses I teach is individual pronunciation tutoring for international students who are going to be teaching assistants here at Ohio State University. One of the resources I use a lot is this clickable IPA chart. Click on any of the sounds in this chart, and you’ll hear a recording of someone uttering the sounds.

Sometimes, though, I wished that it was possible to reduce the visual clutter by having the chart show just the sounds of English, or just the sounds of Chinese, or Korean, or whatever other language a student spoke. I could toggle between the different languages’ phonemic inventories, allowing us to quickly view the phonemes common to multiple languages, and those that are in one phonemic inventory but not another.

At the same time as the chart had too many sounds, it also didn’t have enough of them. Some sounds, like the affricates /tʃ/ (as in chump)and /dʒ/ (as in jump) are displayed on a supplement to the chart (not shown in the screenshot here). There are even bigger gaps for Chinese, since it has three times as many affricates as English, and some of them aren’t displayed on the chart anywhere at all. This is because they’re versions of some affricates that are already shown in the chart, but they’re aspirated (i.e., pronounced with a short puff of air after them). It makes sense not to show these, because if you recorded aspirated versions of all the consonants, it would double the size of the consonant chart. And if you’re going to have separate recordings for the aspirated consonants, why not for the glottalized ones, or the pharyngealized ones, or the nasalized vowels, or the creaky vowels? But still, when I’m working with a Chinese student, and want to show them exactly how the set of sounds they’re used to matches up with what we have in English, I’d like to have all the affricates, aspirated and unaspirated, up there in the main chart with everything else.

A more elaborate clickable IPA chart that I recently learned about and have been using is this rtMRI IPA chart. This one was created by the Signal Analysis and Interpretation Laboratory at the University of Southern California. When you click on the IPA symbols in this chart, you not only hear them pronounced, you also see them pronounced with a real-time MRI (rtMRI) video clip. It is incredibly useful that someone took the trouble to do one of these rtMRIs for each of these sounds, and as a bonus, there are also clickable rtMRI recordings of some minimal vowel sets, some short sentences, and a couple of longer passages that I suspect are panphonemic, though I haven’t checked to be sure.

However, as with the other chart, you need to already know what sounds are in a language in order to know which ones you’re interested in clicking. And like the other chart, this one sidelines the affricates, and shows even fewer of them than the other chart. It wasn’t the customized tool that I sometimes wished were available to me and my students.

A few months ago, I was telling the ESL Programs’ curriculum director, Karen Macbeth, about the kind of chart I wished existed somewhere. As it happens, she was (and is) working on creating an e-textbook for all our Spoken English courses to use, and she said a chart like this one would go well in this kind of digital resource. She put me in touch with one Mike Shiflet, who works for Ohio State University’s Office of Distance Education and E-Learning and who has been helping Karen with her project. I gave Mike some printed IPA charts with different languages’ phonemic inventories highlighted on each one: English, Chinese, Korean, Turkish, Hindi, and Spanish. I showed him the clickable IPA chart that inspired this project. I provided him an audio clip of me pronouncing each of the sounds I wanted. From there, Mike produced the chart I had been dreaming of, and it’s now on OSU’s ESL Programs Spoken English web page for anyone to use! Me, I’m going to start using it tomorrow.

Below is a screenshot of just the (Mandarin) Chinese version of the chart.

I hope this chart proves to be as useful to some ESL/EFL teachers and students as the other clickable IPA charts have been for me.