Pronu-phono-nunciatio-logy and faith ... or not

There are two subjects upon which I feel I should blog, tonight (or soon, anyway): perceived correct pronunciation and perceived correct response of faith. Since I am giddy about one and reflective about the other, my post will be guided entirely by my own attention span and the battery life of this laptop. There is currently 1 hour and 37 minutes left on this juicer; let's see how far I get.

Sonnjea had a really delightful post the other day about language pet peeves. The pecadillos she focused on were mispronunciations or over pronunciations of brand names. People calling Ikea "ee-kay-uh", Swiffer, "swifter" and Toyota "tie-oh-tuh," were the examples she listed. I don't know that I've heard anyone call any of these brands by those pronunciations - except maybe Toyota, and even that might've been a slightly different pronunciation in the case or two that I've heard. But I have every confidence that there are people who pronounce those words like that. Because I'm a linguist (since I'm a semester away from graduation, I'm finally allowing me to call myself that), I was immediately drawn to the phonological issues at work in all three of these words.

Frankly, I'm not sure exactly what's going on with Ikea being called "ee-kay-uh," other than people are probably overlaying their perceived foreign pronunciation onto a known foreign word. I don't know any Swedish or fjordish tongues, so I don't know how Ikea is pronounced there, but it wouldn't be surprising to me if it were not at all like "ee-kay-uh," which is probably closer to how it is pronounced in Mexico City than Stockholm. (Pissed Off Pencil, are you out there to comment?)

As for Swiffer being pronounced "swifter," that's just a simple screw up. "Swiffer" is a deliberately manufactured word used in specific cases, but "swifter" is a real word in the organic lexicon that a speaker can use in many cases. It's simply easier to reach for the familiar.

Now for Toyota. Sonnjea contends that the correct standard American pronunciation is "toy-oh-ta." The last two vowels seem non-controversial for Sonnjea, as I suspect, when she says Toyota, the last vowel is more shwa-like or "uh"-like than "ah"-like. (Please forgive me, if I'm wrong Sonnjea and you have a beautiful "ah" at the end.) I suspect that the reason she hears it sometimes pronounced "TIE-oh-tuh" has something to do with the speaker playing with the diphthong or maybe he hears the first vowel differently to begin with.

You see the "oy" vowel in standard American pronunciation is made of up two different vowels elided together (a diphtong). The first vowel in "oy" is a not-so-round "oh" sound. The second is an "ih" sound like what we hear in "click" or "hit." ("oh" + "ih"). The diphthong in "eye" is made up of the "ah" sound - not like what we do when we go to the doctor, more like in the word "market", minus the "r" - followed by the "ih" sound mentioned above. ("ah + ih"). Great! You say. Clearly it's just diphthong substitution.

Not so fast! It's not just substituting any old "vowel-ih" combo for another. The "oh" of "oy" and the "ah" of "eye" are actually produced pretty close to one another in the mouth. The "oh" is in the back of the mouth and the "ah" is in the front, and both are made with the tongue on almost the same plane. And the "ah" actually requires less work from both the lips and tongue than the "oh" does. Americans LOVE to reduce vowels to schwa (the middle do-nothing vowel we probably all learned about in grade school), so this might just be a similar reduction.

Here's a link to the International Phonetic Alphabet's vowel chart. The "ih" of each diphthong noted is the "I" that looks like a capital "I", in the upper left corner. The "oh" is the one in the lower right that looks like a backward "c," and the "ah" in question is the "a" in the lower left hand corner. The chart is designed to show where in the mouth vowels are produced and how rounded or unrounded they are. For instance "ooo" is rounded, the "u" in the far upper right, and "eee" is unrounded, represented by the "i" in the far upper left.

After I figured out that Sonnjea's Toyota offenders are simply shifting their diphthongs - and my guess is that's probably a reflection of their native region or education - I had another observation. Sonnjea pronounces Toyota "toy-oh-ta." I grew up calling my family's car "To-yoh-tuh" or alternately, "Toy Yoda." I've heard both so much in pop culture, that I suspect both are equally acceptable in standard American pronunciation. The difference is really in where we break the syllables. I know very little about Japanese. If it's anything like other Asian languages I've kind of sniffed, my guess is that it disallows ending a syllable in a consonant, or if it allows syllable-ending consonants, they must be an "m," "n" or "ng." I'm leaning toward thinking they don't allow it. Using that point of view, either pronunciation is right. However, I really don't know if Japanese recognizes or allows diphthongs. If they allow diphthongs - yea! All pronunciations are technically permissible. But if they don't, then we're looking at "Toh-yoh-tah" being correct. That diphthong in English really puts words like Toyota on the fence when it comes to syllable break down, because it creates a glide there, a "ghost Y," if you will.

Sorry to geek out on y'all like that.

For the record, I agree with Sonnjea that people calling Swiffer "swifter" is annoying as hell, as anyone calling a Toyota a TIE-ohtuh would be. I'm indifferent to the Ikea/ee-kay-ah issue. It cracks me up more than anything. I just love language and simple phonology, and her wonderful post just inspired me to get out my gardening gloves. ... considering I'll have to be in that mode next week, when school starts again (groan), that's a good thing.

As for the response of faith issue (something VA Gal and I were discussing this weekend) I wanted to blog on, it'll probably have to wait till later this week when I have more time. I really wanted to make sure I blogged on this, because I'm a massive nerd. And because I like having my dessert first. ... which also probably explains why there's more of me to love these days! Yikes!

I want Hot Chocolate!

I sit here today in a neighborhood bakery having just finished a blueberry bagel and a half pint of milk. Mmm, good. There is a preschool here this morning touring the facilities to learn how bakeries work and what bakers do. It's adorable. The kids are made to wear little plastic gloves while they're back in the baking area. But it's to no real avail. They still stick their fingers in their mouths and pick their noses. So much for a germ free environment! It's so precious, I almost want to cry.

A moment ago, they got to take turns using the PA system calling out orders. "Bagel!" "Lemonade!" and my favorite, "Tart!" which of course sounds more like "taut." I'm listening to one of the bakery reps telling the children that the bakers come in very very early in the morning to bake. "They sleep while you're at school," she tells them. They must think bakers are a whole other species; like bats!

... so I did some more reading about the tempest in a teapot that is the global Muslim reaction to the tasteless Danish cartoons. This article doesn't really go that deeply into it, but apparently the whole thing began with a children's book author. He had written a book for children about Islam, and couldn't find any illustrators for his book. The ones he had contacted all refused because they were afraid if they drew an image of Muhammad, they'd meet the same fate as Dutch filmmaker Theo Van Gogh. I have no idea if the children's book was meant as a mockery or like so many children's Bible and Torah storybooks I've seen in my life. The Danish paper Jyllands-Posten printed the story about the author's dilemma and then offered the challenge to 25 illustrators to draw Muhammad as they saw him. Apparently, when the Danes didn't appologize to the a Danish Muslim group, they took their issue to Middle East counterparts. And so, four months after the original printings, we've got burned embassies, dead protestors and enough charred effigies of Denmark's leader to fill an Ash Wednesday urn.

Yesterday, I viewed the twelve. I would say 7 or 8 of them are tasteless and about 6 flat out offensive. Of the other four, however, some of them are mere depictions: a man leading a donkey in the desert, could'a been any shepherd; a crescent and star with the face of a turbanned man in it. With most of them, if you didn't know you were supposed to be looking at Muhammad, you probably wouldn't know. That probably stems from the fact that unlike Christianity which after 2,000 years of popular art kind of has a standard "this is what Jesus looks like" image, Islam has no standard, so looking at the images you just think: oh, uh, dude with a turban and a beard. One, which I thought was kind of funny, had a line up of scraggly looking guys with beards, some of them turbanned, others not, and the person viewing the line up says something to the effect of, "I really don't know which one he is." That seems to be a comment on the image ban - how would you know? One didn't included any image of Muhammad, but rather a guy at a chalk board complaining about the image ban. Another showed an artist drawing an image of the Prophet, furtively, in the dark, so as not to be "caught." One showed a duo of scimitared angry men charging, only to be stayed by Muhammad's hand: "Don't bother with them," he tells them, "They are just ignorant unbeliever Danes." I'm sure that can be seen as offensive, but the fact that Muhammad stops them, seems to me to give the Prophet a credit toward tolerance that the Western world seems to ignore. On the whole, I thought the exercise was iffy. On the one hand, I kind of thought the invitation for images kind of set up an environment of "Hey, let's be an asshole." On the other, I thought it produced some interesting pieces, which, as good political cartoons should, add to the dialogue. But it doesn't sound like satire is a concept many Islamic republics and monarchies.

Many of the cartoons were indeed offensive and out-right meanspirited. But others were good: if not just plain depictions, then reflections of how western artists feel stymied in discussing Islam in public. I know there are many people who find The Davinci Code and the Last Temptation of Christ as offensive to Christianity and their personal relationship with God as Muslims find any depiction (whether positive or negative) of Muhammad. But to my knowledge, none of the DaVinci code protestors have burned the house of Dan Brown or Ron Howard or Kazantzakis or Scorsese. If these images are that offensive, is violence the only proper response? Protest - yes. Boycott - why not? But kidnapping, burning embassies, firing guns into the air, carrying signs that call for the 9/11 of London? What the hell does that do? Just reinforce the fearful, ugly stereotype that the West has of Muslims. And who does that help? Not Muslims. And not the West. Jyllands-Posten was intolerably tasteless to instigate, but it seems the Middle East response just plays into their prejuecies, and is in and of itself intolerable.

Whom I feel sorriest for is the children's author and the children who will now be denied a book about Islam. I'm giving him the benefit of the doubt and assuming he was writing a book for children about Islam so that little non-Muslim Danish children could learn about their Muslim friends. Or so that Muslim parents could better teach their own children. But it looks like that won't happen anytime soon.

I hope this all blows over. I want to laugh again.

Chomsky hates me

... or at least he should. Outside of the basic sentence mobile, I don't "get" syntax at all.

This might be the last meeting of my Syntax class this semester. Our prof arranged the class schedule so that we could end class a week early, or go to the end (next week) if we wanted. As class has a narcotic effect on all of us - including those who thrive on the torture that is syntax - I suspect we'll opt to end it tonight. I still have two more papers to turn in. Luckily he'll be accepting those for a few more weeks. However, I don't know if I have any more brain power to drudge something up for two more papers. This week, I thought I had a topic, an arguement. Then last night I sat down to write it, only to discover I didn't.

I can't wait for this class to be over. Just two more papers and I never have to worry about Case Theory or Binding Theory or anything like that again. My brain can stop being the puddle of snot that it has become in the last 16 weeks.