Starbucks is featured on this blog often enough lately that I'm starting to think I should ask for a promotional fee (for the record, I drink Starbucks only when I stop at a service station and there isn't another coffee place because, for reasons explored in another post, their coffee is not catered to my tastes).
Here's their Christmas advert:
The slogan is 'carry the merry', meaning that you're carrying around a drink full of Christmas spirit. Someone posted on twitter the other day that they bet linguists were all excited about it and I was thinking that it's a *bit* interesting that the adjective merry is the object of the verb, but not that exciting surely? and then days later I realised that this is an example of the merry-marry-Mary merger.
This is a sound pattern that's incredibly well described and studied so we don't need to go into it here, but suffice to say that for most North American speakers, those three words sound identical (there are regional patterns where only two of them do, or none, or it varies). In the UK, other English-speaking countries, and in the parts of the US without this merger (e.g. Philadelphia), the three words are pronounced differently, as they are for me. (I think this generalisation is true; there may be other varieties with the merger or part of it but I'm not a specialist in this area.)
It affects words with a vowel coming before an /r/ so carry is also affected, and the slogan would rhyme for many Americans. For their customers without this particular merger, it's assonance instead.
I think that the fact that I didn't even notice it despite someone saying it was linguistically interesting shows just how much this goes below the radar. When someone has a different accent from you, you accommodate really easily and hear vowels especially as being 'the same' as your own. It sounds a bit odd if you try to imitate their vowel sounds so we just accept that these very different sounds are 'the same' in some way and in many cases can't even hear that they're different. There was a bit in Vocal Fries last year where host Carrie Gillon describes a time when she asked her professor to say her name correctly because he was pronouncing it with a British-type vowel, and she said 'say it as if it's spelt Kerry'. This really surprised me because although I can hear how (my) Kerry vowel is closer* to (her) Carrie vowel than (my) Carrie vowel is, I distinctly hear her name as Carrie and not Kerry, probably in part because I've seen it written down. (This type of confusing sentence is also why lexical sets were invented.)
*If you're interested, it sounds closer because it literally is closer: they're produced in a more similar area of the mouth, at the front, with the difference just in the height of the tongue, whereas the British** Carrie vowel is produced with the tongue further back in the mouth.
**These things are different again in Scotland which has a different set of vowel rules, so some of what I say about the UK applies here but not all of it.
Interesting. When is a pronunciation of somebody's name wrong, rather than just an accent? When are two names with the same spelling but different pronunciation actually different names?
ReplyDeleteIf two people say the verb “carry” differently in their accents, that's the same word, and neither is wrong. If each of them say “Carrie” the same as they do “carry”, then is that just a continuation of the accent difference or is one of them now saying Carrie's name wrongly?
If group of people include a Carrie who says their name one way and a Carrie who says their name another way, is that two people called Carrie, or two people with different names (that just happened to be spelt the same way)? If the former, you could write “We met the Carries” — but how would you pronounce that?
OK, ‘carry’ and ‘Carrie’ are different words, but what about, say, Rowan? We have a friend who's named their child Rowan, explicitly saying it's the same as the rowan tree. But ... the friend says “rowan [tree]” differently to how I do (“row” as in argument v “row” as in boat). That's fine, we can pronounce our trees differently, but how do I say the child's name?
If I say it like the tree, am I getting it wrong, or just saying their name in my accent? Is ‘their name but in my accent’ even a thing? If I say it like Rowan's parent does, it's no longer the same word as the tree, which their name is supposed to be. If I have to say “That's a nice photo of Rowan standing by the rowan” and I pronounce them differently does that suggest I don't get the link or I'm disagreeing that it's the same word?
Do I also have to change how I pronounce the tree when I'm in their company? (And if so, can I, for balance, pick a word that they have to change their pronunciation of when around me?)
What about if two people called Rowan meet, each with their name pronounced differently but both named after the tree? Would they collectively be Rowans? Can they both simultaneously have the same name as the tree? And would it be possible to say “That's a nice photo of Rowan playing with Rowan by the rowan tree” without getting somebody's name wrong?
There was actually some discussion of this in the specific context, and given that the professor had the phoneme available in his inventory and the situation was ok to ask him to change, it was fine. There are also considerations of power dynamics, of course. So in your Rowan example, I think you should say the child's name as they prefer. If you then change your pronunciation of the tree when you're in their company, that's probably not a big deal for you, and it would seem petty to me if you 'retaliated' with a word you wanted me to pronounce differently in return. Sometimes, insisting on a specific pronunciation would not be a trivial thing and it would reflect inequalities and prejudices and then it would be more significant. I'm thinking for instance of what's considered 'correct' pronunciation in second language contexts and in regional/class-based/ethnicity-linked variation.
DeleteThanks. The ‘retaliation’ was being silly. So far it's only been the parent's pronunciation, and I do try to match it for their child (which wouldn't've done before their child if we were just chatting about trees).
DeleteI haven't met the child since they've learned to speak. They are growing up in a different area from where the parent who named them did, so may themselves even up saying the tree differently from how their parent does.
Re second-language and regional variation: if somebody has a non-English name, then we should of course say it like they do; it'd be rude to anglicize it into a different name. That applies even if there's an English name with the same spelling (Angela Rippon v Angela Merkel, for instance).
It's less clear-cut with regional variations. Mimicking somebody's accent risks sounding like you're mocking them. If you have two colleagues called Angela, one from Northern Ireland and one from Birmingham, say, it might not come across well if you effect the accent in question when saying their names, pronouncing them differently from each other. Saying the name as you would if it'd be been your/your mother's name seems safer.
A UK–American difference is a bit like each of those. Maybe it depends on how different the name sounds? If somebody can say “Say it as though it's spelt X”, maybe that indicates a significant difference that we should try to replicate (and which we should have picked up on before they actually got round to requesting “Say it ...”), and for lesser differences it's better not to?
Anyway, apologies for dragging your comments off on a tangent. And thank you for the post, without which it would never have occurred to me that that slogan would rhyme for anybody.
No need to apologise for the tangent! It's all good. I'm cringing just thinking about mimicking an accent for saying someone's name.
Delete(also I have never heard of anyone pronouncing 'rowan' that way, but apparently it's a thing, so I've learnt something too)
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