Grainy painies

For some reason, the other day I remembered a thing that happened on TV years ago. Frank Skinner had a chat show at the time, and Britney Spears was big, so I suppose it was probably the late 1990s. Britney was on Frank’s programme, and she at some point used the term ‘granny panties’ to mean ‘big knickers’.

Normally, we translate effortlessly between accents, so much so that we don’t even notice that we’re doing it most of the time. If someone tells you their name and they have an accent different from yours, you repeat it back in your own accent, not in an imitation of the way they said it. Let’s say you’re from London and your friend is from Vancouver, and her name is Martina. She’s probably got a ‘rhotic’ accent so she’ll pronounce the ‘r’ in her name, but you probably won’t. When you say her name back to her to check you heard it right, you aren’t going to pronounce the ‘r’ just because she does.

That’s why it’s weird when this doesn’t happen. When Britney said ‘granny panties’, it wasn’t a phrase Frank had ever heard before. Britney’s accent is also very different from Frank’s, and when she said it, what he heard (and repeated back to her) was ‘grainy painies’. If you can’t relate the sound string you hear to a known word or phrase, the only thing you can do is approximate the way it sounded. What you say sounds just like the phrase but you don’t know what it is you’re saying.

I see something like this in my first year seminars. One week, we do an exercise where they have to work out what phrase is written in phonetic transcription. The way to do this is to ‘sound it out’. Often, they are literally saying the exact phrase perfectly, but they can’t hear the words or extract the meaning from the string of sound. It’s fascinating and completely hilarious.

Serial verbs, rhoticity and detective work

 

There's a song out at the minute called Come save me by a band (or maybe a person, I don't know) called Jagwar Ma. It's quite good - you can listen to it at Soundcloud. It caught my attention because although the title is Come save me, he clearly sings Come and save me in the chorus. I wonder if it was a typing error somewhere that's ended up becoming official.

The come save me construction, we'll call the serial verb construction (because that's what it is, basically, though it's not as productive as in languages that have proper serial verb constructions), and let's call the other, with and, the conjoined verb construction. It probably has a proper name but I'm teaching in a few minutes so don't have time for extensive (or any) research.

To my ear, the serial verb construction is much more a US usage, and in the UK we would tend towards the conjoined verb construction. This is unsubstantiated by anything other than my own intuitions, and corpus research would no doubt prove me wrong (especially as I think the serial verb construction has increased in use over here in recent years - though that may well be the recency illusion). But there we are, that's my intuition.

So then, I thought, where are they from, these Jagwar Ma people (or this Jagwar Ma person)? Rather than, you know, google it, I used linguistics. First, I eliminated the US, or at least most of it. Almost all US accents are rhotic (r-pronouncing) (some are not, in the South for instance), so they would pronounce the /r/ at the end of Jagwar. That would mean that the name wouldn't rhyme, and surely you don't give yourself a name like that without intending it to rhyme. That leaves the UK as a possibility, but what about Australia, for example? They're also non-rhotic down under. Well, it turns out that Jagwar Ma is from Sydney (yeah, I googled it), which fits just nicely with the non-rhoticity and also makes the words rhyme very well. I can't easily find out if the serial verb construction is more common than the conjoined verb construction, or vice versa. I'd bet that the singer/song-writer has the conjoined verb construction, though.

A side note: I expect that, if the serial verb construction is indeed on the rise in the UK, some people would complain about this terrible Americanism sweeping the language of today's young people. But Wikipedia tells me that Maggie Tallerman (1998) gives this as a construction surviving from Early Modern English, so yaa boo sucks to those people.

SFTY1ST in the N.T.

Superlinguo over at Tumblr has posted a list of number plates that police cars in Australia's Northern Territory will carry to promote road safety. Superlinguo says: 

You’ve gotta admit, these winners have used incredibly creative word combinations to create a message within a seven-character limit.
How many can you decipher? How does your brain deal with the lack of spaces, case markings and vowels?

•    SPDKILS
•    BUCKLUP
•    DRVSAFE
•    INDIC8
•    WATCHNU
•    PATROLN
•    NO2DUI
•    COPPA
•    N4SIR
•    BSAFE
•    YDUI
•    MYISONU
•    DNTSPD
•    RDSAFTY
•    BSAFEM8
•    KEEPLFT
•    SBRBOB*
•    NOFONE
•    NOSPEDN
•    CLKCLAK
•    NO*BUZE
•    YSPEED
•    TAKITEZ
•    BELTUP
•    DONTDUI
•    NOTXTN
•    SOBABOB
•    SLOWDWN
•    KPNSAFE
•    WATCHIN  
* We’ll give you a hint with this one, because we found it a bit obscure and had to look it up: Sober Bob is a long-running campaign by the Northern Territory police to discourage drink driving by urging people to organise their ride home before they go drinking, i.e. nominating a ‘Sober Bob’ option early, to make sure they get home safe.Thanks to Alice Springs resident Emily for forwarding us the list.

It's easy enough to work out what most of them mean, though doing it at speed with only a brief glance at the plate might prove harder (MYISONU would be particularly tough). Some of them are also more effective than others.

I especially like CLKCLAK, which I imagine is the equivalent of our 'clunk click' slogan, meant to represent the sound of a seatbelt buckle. That's a much better message than BUCKLUP or BELTUP, which are just simple instructions. CLKCLAK works because it's memorable, sticks in your head and you know immediately what it means.

Another personal favourite is BSAFEM8, perfectly reflecting the Australian dialect. Nowhere else in the world would you call anyone and everyone 'mate', especially from a policeman to a member of the public. We do have 'mate' as a generic term of address in the UK, though usually more among men, and in this case it's fine to use it with a stranger if you're both on an equal footing socially. It would be just about possible for a policeman to say it to someone they didn't know, but it would be for a reason, like if they wanted to calm them down and make themself more approachable. It can't be used as universally as it can in Australian English.

And finally, those SBRBOB and SOBABOB ones. As the note says, they're referring to a character called Sober Bob. What interests me is that there are two spellings, one reflecting a rhotic (r-pronouncing) pronunciation of 'sober' (SBR) and one not (SOBA). I think Australian English is generally non-rhotic, so I wonder if there are some varieties that are rhotic, or whether it's simply because of the spelling, and the R is not intended to be pronounced.