The pronunciation of plantain

 Please enjoy this nice linguistic observation made by someone on twitter: 

The pronunciation of “plantain”

When a word has the suffix “-tain” it’s pronounced ‘tayn’ when it’s a verb, and ‘tin’ when it’s a noun

Verb: contain, maintain, entertain, ascertain, pertain
Noun: captain, fountain, curtain, mountain… plantain https://t.co/jXv6BEGSsN

— Sean Daley (@daleyvibes) December 17, 2021

We'll deal with the minor quibble first: –tain is not a suffix in most of these words. For it to be a suffix, it would need to be at least somewhat productively affixable, and really it's just in these words as a remnant. In the verbs it's what we might call a 'bound base', as it comes from Latin tenere 'hold', so contain is 'hold with', maintain is 'hold in the hand', entertain is 'hold together', and so on. In the nouns it's more just an accidental similarity in that mountain, fountain etc come from French words montaigne, fontaine, etc. Plantain comes from Spanish plátano. 

So, not a suffix per se, but nevertheless, the observation seems to hold. The author of the tweet even provides the exception that proves the rule: bloodstain isn't pronounced like 'tin', but it's also not got the morpheme –tain (as it's part of stain). 

It fits with other noun/verb pronunciations, such as the stress difference on record depending on whether it's a noun (play a REcord) or a verb (reCORD the show). I listen to a lot of knitting podcasts and I've noticed this with repeat, which I would always say with final stress, which I put down to the fact that it's normally a verb. But it can be a noun, in knitting, as your pattern may have a certain number of repeats. While I would still give this final stress, quite a few of the podcasters (all American English, though I'm not sure if that's relevant) will say REpeat with initial stress when it's a noun. 

Our –tain tweeter is making a point about the pronunciation of the final example, plantain, which white people typically say with the 'tayn' version while Caribbean or West African people pronounce it 'tin', so it also functions as a helpful mnemonic in that sense and I for one learnt something here and haven't said it 'tayn' since. 

Let's lead led away

All the way back in 2013, I declared the spelling of the past tense of the verb lead, which is standardly spelt led, dead. Or ded. I'd noticed it being misspelt as lead so many times, including on the BBC news website, that I thought it was probably simply prolonging its agony to try to preserve led. Of course it's still around, because inexplicably I'm not in charge, and written language doesn't change that fast. But I was reminded about it the other day and was frustrated all over again by the fact that this one is actually one that has sensible spelling and pronunciation, unlike most of our irregular past tenses. 

Lead is pronounced with an 'ee' sound, like read, and led is pronounced like red, so it really ought to be totally transparent and memorable and unproblematic. The problem with lead/led is, though, that we also have read/read, which is not spelt red, though we have another word that is. Oh and we also have the word lead, for the metal, which is pronounced like led. All of which obscures the fact that lead and led are pronounced more or less as they're spelt, unlike read (past tense) and lead (the metal). 

I feel bad for it, I really do, but I also think it would just be simpler to let it slip quietly away. 

(Moderate) Spelling reform

Advice about keeping a blog always says not to apologise for not writing for a while, because no one will really notice, so just write whatever it is without mentioning it. But I'm not apologising; I'm noting the fact that this term was so bloody ridiculous that I didn't have one single bit of head space to knock out a blog post now and again, a task that I know from experience only takes me about half an hour while I'm watching telly (yes, sorry, I don't give you, my adoring public, my best time, or in fact much time... you deserve more, but I'm not paid for this). 

So hey, welcome back. It's been a few months. I have a few things I saved for later, so I'll go through them and see if any of them at all are still relevant. For now, let's talk about this spelling reform that got voted in by the English Spelling Society last week. It's actually surprisingly sensible, though of course totally unnecessary. It doesn't change much, and they suggest that the minimal changes are just sort of floated in as legitimate alternatives and that they'll hopefully catch on as standard. Seems fair enough. There's a screenshot of the Times article about it below, which I'm not linking to as it's paywalled but you can find if you want. 

It's just things like having double consonants mean something consistent, I think syllable stress, and removing Es that don't change pronunciation. So you get surender but edducate. I can't tell what the logic is behind changing fields to feelds but not beaches to beeches; they say that it's ok to have one sound be spelt in different ways but each spelling should make one sound, so maybe it's because <ie> is taken for the /ai/ ('eye') sound. 

It overlooks that there are some things that won't make any more sense to people who don't speak Standard Southern British English, of course, as they always do. So they say good will be guud, and foot will be fuut, and blue will be bloo. Totally fine for me, as good and foot do have the same vowel, while blue has a different one. But there are some speakers who have more or less the same vowel in all three of those words and others who have a different vowel in the first two. So I'm not sure it will achieve its aim of making spelling more logical for everyone. 

I wonder whether people who are planning to adopt it will need to write a little note to say so until it catches on. So if someone wants to submit their essay with this spelling, will they put a note at the top to say that's what they've done? 

This is reminiscent of the howling of the papers recently, including the Times I might add, about universities being advised not to deduct marks for bad spelling. When I mark essays I already don't take marks off for incorrect spelling or non-standard English. We haven't 'taken marks off' for anything for years, in fact, as we award marks for what is done well against a set of marking criteria, which include 'clarity of expression' and 'accuracy'. This is likely to include a lack of spelling errors, but doesn't absolutely require it as you can be clear and still spell things differently. The Times article itself says:

[Hull] university said that it would instead “encourage students to develop a more authentic academic voice, a voice that can communicate complex ideas with rigour and integrity — that celebrates, rather than obscures their particular background or characteristics”.

But they then quote Frank Furedi (lamentably from my own institution) saying that inclusive assessment 'violates the norms of academic education', so I'll have to check with them whether it would be OK to use these new spellings or not. I don't know why they went to Furedi, a retired sociology professor, rather than one of the many linguists or pedagogy experts, no, I can't imagine the reason. 

Anyway, spelling reform, sure, whatever, it's not really needed but go ahead, but encouraging students to find an authentic academic voice seems a good thing to me, and I secretly hope that one day someone will submit an essay written entirely in their own non-standard variety as a conscious act of linguistic politics. 

Kerry the marry

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. 

Asking questions to share knowledge on twitter

Anyway, back to linguistics after all the disquisitions on the state of HE. Susie Dent posted a nice fun fact about the word two on twitter.

Wordy fact of the day for kids: the number ‘two’ may have a silent ‘w’, but it’s part of the same ancient family that gave us ‘twin’, ‘twice’, ‘between’, ‘tweezers’, ‘twenty’, and ‘twelve’: all of them have something to do with that number 2. #homeschooling

— Susie Dent (@susie_dent) April 20, 2020

The first reply was best: it said simply 'Twix'. But the other replies were really interesting to someone who has recent experience of doing linguistics in public and aspirations to do more of it.

There are lots that are comments, reactions, unrelated replies, of course. The ones I'm interested in fall into two groups: questions, and related facts. Both of them fulfil the same locutionary role: to show that the tweeter has some knowledge of language, to convey enthusiasm, and something else slightly undefinable about interacting with celebrities that you don't know personally on twitter.

The related facts, first. Let's give these gentlemen the benefit of the doubt and assume that they were not mansplaining Susie (i.e. assuming that they, as non-experts in this field, can educate her about her literal field of expertise). So they're doing something else – the fact is to add to the original one, give more detail, add more context, and it's for the benefit of other readers of the original tweet. This is not how 'replying' works in normal conversations, but it's how it often works on twitter.

German has the same root but the "w" is still pronounced in Zwei (Two) and we also get Zwilling (Twin), zweimal (Twice), zwischen (between), zwanzig (twenty) and zwölf (twelve) although tweezers are usually "Pinzetten" which shares a root with pincers.

— Rod Maxwell (@RodericMaxwell) April 20, 2020

And in Dutch ‘twee’ with the W pronounced and the ‘ee’ pronounced as ‘ay’. All the same root. Love how the histories of different languages are intertwined.

— Xander Mol (@Xander_Mol) April 20, 2020

My wife who speaks Scots pronounces it tway.

— James Beaton (@jjb3621) April 20, 2020

Then there's the questions. Some of them are simply information seeking – the fact prompted the asker to seek more information about something that occurred to them. But many of them also have a secondary purpose of showing off a bit, being a bit clever, making an observation and wanting to share it but also doing that in a deferential, face-saving way, to indicate that they are aware that Susie Dent is an expert and already knows this (a question implies that the asker believes the answerer knows the answer).

Does that mean the 'tw' would have had a twə sound originally, rather than pronounced to? So literally two (twoo).

— Zoe Defoe (@ZoeDefoe1) April 20, 2020

(This one is also cute and interesting because they don't mean that the /tw/ would be pronounced /twə/ in the word two, but to say the sound /tw/ on its own you would say /twə/, with an unstressed vowel at the end to make it pronounceable, and I like this a lot.)

This one is a perfect example of the 'question as knowledge-sharing' tactic (though I think in this case the answer is no):

Is the 'in' from 'twin' related to the 'en' plural ending, like in children or brethren or eyen a few hundred years ago?

— John Moynes (@JohnMoynes) April 20, 2020

Croiffle: The verdict

On my way home from the Linguistics Association of Great Britain annual meeting last week, this advert on the train (too late, I was already on my way to Kent at this point) offered me a free speciality coffee with purchase of their new 'croiffle'.

Advert offering a free coffee if you buy a 'croiffle'

A croiffle?, you might ask. And what is a croiffle? Using my linguistic skills, honed over the course of the last fifteen years of intensive linguistic training, I intuited that it is a croissant of some kind (see image) with something unspeakable done to it. Obviously this is a blend, or portmanteau, of croissant and, I assume, waffle, as it's apparently been toasted in a waffle machine. Why you would do this, I do not know.

But how do you pronounce it? While I and a friend both went with the vowel of croissant (slightly different for each of us, with his being more similar to the French than mine (/ɒ/ vs /ʌ/)), another friend said it as she saw it and used the oi of, well, Oi!. And a portmanteau that no one knows how to pronounce is an unsuccessful new word, especially if it's also just a toasted croissant that's a bit bumpy.

A-g-nother g-nu

In the recent series of University Challenge: The Professionals, shown at Christmas time, Jeremy Paxman asked a question involving a gnu. A gnu is an animal, also known as a wildebeest. Here's what they look like:

Brilliantly, Wiktionary captions this photo as 'a few gnus'

It's pronounced the same as 'new', where the 'g' is not silent, exactly, because it changes the pronunciation of the 'n', but it's not pronounced as a /g/. However, in the well-known Flanders and Swann song The Gnu, some of the joke is centred around the pronunciation /gnu:/, with a hard 'g'. This animal isn't that commonly talked about, so you most often hear it in the context of this song, which means that it can be quite hard to remember it's not actually pronounced /gnu:/. Paxman apparently failed to remember this as well, as he pronounced the 'g' when he said it. I'll add this to the list of 'language influenced by comedy'.

Oldman, not old man

Another thing I watched over Christmas was a repeat of A Touch of Cloth, a comedy detective series by Charlie Brooker. There's a character in it called Detective Oldman, and many jokes are had around her surname and the phrase old man. The thing is, the name is pronounced differently from the phrase. You pronounce the name with a reduced second vowel, so it's [ˈɒldmən], whereas the phrase old man is pronounced something like [ɒldˈmæn] (the first vowel varies a bit). Even if you don't read IPA, you can see they're different in the vowels used and where the stress is placed. This meant that in the programme, for the jokes to work, her name had to be pronounced like the phrase rather than in the usual way, which sounds decidedly weird. 

Daily Fail fails to ask a linguist (again)

It's no surprise when a newspaper publishes an article about language and fails to ask a linguist. They rarely do. It's even less of a surprise when the newspaper is the Daily Mail and the 'article' is actually just a summary of a website (note to newspapers: this is not journalism. It's lazy. Especially when you get to it two weeks after the rest of the internet has already seen it).

This 'article' summarises a reddit thread for us, which is actually quite handy because reddit threads are horrible things to read. The questioner wanted to know what the hardest English words to pronounce are. Here's the top ten, as reported by the Mail:

1. Worcestershire
2. Specific
3. Squirrel
4. Brewery 
5. Phenomenon
6. Derby
7. Regularly
8. February
9. Edited
10. Heir

The Mail then helpfully made some very condescending comments about how specific and squirrel are 'apparently easy' and brewery and edited 'seem rather straightforward to the average Brit', while February and phenomenon are 'notorious tongue twisters even for native speakers'.

So far, so utterly, utterly dull and vacuous.

Among the linguistically interesting things to note here is the fact that there are two types of difficulty: hard to articulate, and hard to predict. Derby is very easy to say for most people, but it's hard to predict its pronunciation from its spelling. Similarly heir and, of course, Worcestershire, which has the further problem of being long and daunting.

On the other hand, specific, squirrel, brewery, February and edited are all pronounced more or less like they're spelt, but it's actually saying them without stumbling that can prove tricky. They have consonant clusters like [skw], and lots of [r] sounds and 'glides' [w] that occur between vowels, making them hard to keep control of. February causes native speakers less trouble than the Mail would have you believe, because we don't try to pronounce both those [r] sounds.

[r] in general crops up a lot here, probably because a lot of the contributors to the list speak a first language like Chinese where [r] and [l] are not two different sounds, but rather two 'versions' of a sound ('allophones'). English contrasts these sounds (so read and lead are different words), but doesn't contrast the two 'k' sounds in car and key, for instance (so you can't the difference unless you're trained to do so). If your language treats [r] and [l] as being as similar as those English considers those two 'k' sounds, you can imagine the difficulty regularly or squirrel is going to cause you.

Likewise, edited contains a string of short, similar vowels separated by [d] or [t]. Those two sounds are very similar to each other, differing only in terms of whether they're 'voiced' or not ([d] is, [t] isn't) and again, many languages don't contrast these sounds. In many English dialects (e.g. US English), they are actually pronounced more or less the same in this word. You end up with some sequence of rapid tapping of the tongue against the back of the teeth which is over almost before you realise you've begun it.

(Incidentally, no one in real life pronounces the name of the sauce as Worcestershire - everyone calls it 'Worcester sauce'. Apparently this is frowned upon by the company that makes it, but it's true.)

Mispronunciation humiliation

[Sorry - this is a short and rushed post. It's Week 0.]

I was reminded the other day (because I mentioned it) that I only recently discovered how to pronounce the word archipelago. As I said in that conversation, discovering how to pronounce words as an adult tends to be an embarrassing realisation that you've misinterpreted something your whole life, usually in front of more people than you would like.

In this case I suppose it's not so embarrassing, but the reason for my mispronunciation (with stress on the -la- syllable rather than the -pel- syllable) was because I was simply looking at the word as an undecomposable whole. Had I known that the word came from a Greek prefix arkhi and root pelagos (which I ought to have recognised, really, given how much I like the word pelagic), I might have had a better chance (though perhaps not, as I also pronounce pelagic with stress on the penultimate syllable).

A tricky pronunciation problem

(from Viz)

How do you pronounce this?

This has bugged me for years. There's this acronym on the window of a building I pass at Northumbria University:

I've sort of been pronouncing it like 'New Deal' in my mind (never having had cause to say it out loud). But maybe it's pronounced like 'noodle'.

Both have their pros and cons. New Deal is a bit more relevant than noodle to a design innovation lab, I suppose, but it's a sort of unwieldy phrase to have as your acronym. Then again, www is famously three times as many syllables as the phrase it's 'short' for. Also, the DIL is capitalised like it should be stressed.

Noodle seems a bit unrelated to design, and involves pronouncing the 'nu' as if you're from the Southeast (of England - think Jimmy Carr), but on the other hand it's a good word and fun to say.

Thoughts?

The perils of international trade

I read a really nice piece in the Bangkok Post this week (yeah, I'm global). It was written by an Australian, as far as I can gather from the textual clues, who has been living in Thailand for 22 years. This, I think, makes him qualified to comment on Thai matters with an authoritative outsider's point of view. His article concerns the pronunciation of companies when they open branches in Thailand. Ikea is the business he discusses, and how many Thai people have begun saying it as 'ickier'. The writer suggests a possible reason for this:

The answer lies in the ''I'' at the beginning of the word. In Thai, a short sharp ''I'' is a derogatory way of describing somebody. If you didn't like me, for example, you can call me ''I-Andrew'' with a scowl, though not to my face because it's very rude. I am guessing Ikea sounds like a rude way of referring to a person by the name of ''Kea''.

But some companies have fared a lot worse in the name-mangling stakes. Volvo, for instance:

First, there is no ''v'' in Thai, so they replace it with a ''w''. Second, the final sound of a syllable in Thai cannot end in ''l'', so ''Vol'' becomes ''Wonn''. And so Volvo becomes Wonn-wor.

Thai is, actually, a language with a very different phonology from English so pronunciation is hard in both directions. My Thai friends are too polite to laugh at me when I try to do it, but they can't quite hide their amusement.

Penelope Keith and the stress pattern of English

In this week's Radio Times, the actress Penelope Keith gets worked up about the pronunciation of certain words: 

If I hear 'lamentable', she says with a shudder, 'or worse, 'irrevocable', I want to get a brick and throw it at the wireless. We have to keep screaming[...] because if we don't, this kind of this will become current.

Disregarding (or 'irregardless', if you prefer - it would undoubtedly annoy Penelope) the fact that it's already current, of she wouldn't be hearing it on 'the wireless', what's her problem?


Well, I don't have access to the OED here but Dictionary.com tells me that it is pronounced with the stress on the first syllable. In fact, Merriam-Webster gives it with the stress on the ment syllable, and stressed on the first as an alternative. Clearly, this is an old and well-established pronunciation. Still, Penelope Keith doesn't like it and others probably feel the same way. This is just yer basic peeving and not to be worried about.


But what interested me was that it actually seems odd to pronounce it the way she would like. English generally, in long words, puts the stress on the antepenultimate syllable:

an.te.pe.'nul.ti.mateex.tra.te.'rre.stri.al'fru.mi.ous 'ban.der.snatch

Not always, of course, there are exceptions:

ar.che.'ty.palpho.to.'gra.phic'ca.ter.pi.llar

I don't know enough about this kind of thing to know what causes these to be different, but I suspect it's something to do with the morphology and compounding involved in creating these words. But for lamentable and irrevocable, it seems absolutely natural to follow the pattern and stick the primary stress on the ment and voc bits, not least because we have la'ment and re'voke, although of course stress often changes when words are inflected (cf. pho.'to.gra.phy and pho.to.'gra.phic above). 


So why would we expect the pronunciation preferred by Penelope? I don't have an answer to this one; it's a genuine question. Answers on the back of a postcard (or in the comments). 

An hypothesis or a hypothesis?

I stumbled across the phrase an hypothesis in a book yesterday and it gave me pause. Surely, I thought to myself, that can't be right? I never use an with words beginning with the [h] sound myself, but even if you do, I thought, you wouldn't use it with hypothesis. Here's approximately what I assumed was the rule, never having troubled to learn it:

If the word once had a silent h (because it was borrowed from French), use an. Otherwise (f'rinstance if it's borrowed from Greek), use a. Therefore it would be an hotel but a hypothesis.

Not so. I looked it up. Nowadays, of course, the rule is to use a wherever [h] is pronounced (a hotel), and an wherever h is silent (an honour), and very sensible the rule is too. But if one did want to use an, one should properly do so with words longer than 'about three syllables' and which have an unstressed initial syllable. Hypothesis, for instance.

And it turns out not to be a stupid left-over-from-history rule either: it really is easier to say an when the syllable is not stressed, because it takes too much effort to stop after a and start again on the relatively weak [h] sound in an unstressed syllable.

Texes? New plurals in English

I'm having some trouble with my mobile phone tariff at the moment, and I rang up the other day to ask how it's going. The woman I spoke to in the call centre had an accent from south-east England; let's say it was a London accent, though I can't really tell the difference between accents down there. She told me that she had added some texts on to my account, but she pronounced the word something like /'teksɪz/.