Category: Languages

“He Idn’t Feelin’ Well Today”

A reader writes:

Mr. Akin,
 
Your post about coke-soda-pop usage
brought to mind a question I have about southern accents.  A friend told me
that while visiting up north a sales clerk asked her what part of Tennessee
she was from.  Connie was surprised by the question and asked the
clerk how she knew that she (Connie) was from Tennessee.  The clerk replied
that only people from Tennessee say "dudn’t", as in "He dudn’t like any kind of
ice cream but vanilla". 
 
As soon as Connie mentioned
it I realized that I also say "dudn’t".  However, I am skeptical
that it is only used in Tennessee.   I’ve lived in Louisiana and
Oklahoma and no one ever commented on my use of "dudn’t" so that makes me
suspect it is fairly common, at least in the south.  What do you
think?

The phenomenon you’re talking about is a common feature of Southern accents. It’s a feature of my own accent, as Fr. Vincent Serpa (Catholic Answers’ chaplain) pointed out to me. (Previously I had been unconscious of it.) Listen to the radio show sometime, and you’ll hear me using it.

What is going on here is that the /s/ and /z/ sounds (both sibilant or "hissing" sounds) are being dentalized (pronounced againt the teeth) in certain circumstances. Thus "wasn’t" > /wadn’t/, "isn’t" > /idn’t/, and "doesn’t" > /dudn’t/. ("Wasn’t" and "doesn’t" commonly uses /z/ in non-Southern speech, while "isn’t" commonly uses /s/.)

This shift isn’t surprising since the point of articulation for both sibilant and dental sounds is just behind the teeth.

The more interesting question is the circumstances in which this occurs. I don’t have enough data to tell for sure, but my guess is that it’s due (at least in part) to the /n/ sound that follows the /s/ or /z/ in the cited examples.

/n/ is a nasal sound (you may be stunned to learn), where the airflow is directed through the nose. If you’re gearing up to make a nasal sound like /n/, it might be a little harder to make a sibilant sound (where the airflow is directed through the mouth with the teeth in a particular configuration to allow us to hiss), and so a simplification of the situation might be to dentalize the sibilant in preparation for the nasal /n/.

Alternately, the speaker may be so focused on getting ready for the /n/ sound that what he is doing is omitting the sibilant, and the resulting pronunciation effort creates a de facto /d/ as he makes the transition.

Further research (or a professional linguist) could tell us for sure whether such conjectures are correct.

See, there’s this whole interesting world of pronunciation that occurs unconsciously to us most of the time, but linguists spend endless hours pulling apart transcriptions of what sounds people use when they speak and trying to figure out the arcane rules that we’re unconsciously obeying.

The study of these pronunciation schemes area is called "phonology," and each accent within a language is basically a different pronunciation scheme or set of rules that people unconsciously follow when pronouncing words. There’s even a different module in our brains that governs phonology (separate from the modules that govern grammar and meaning). If you’re learning a new accent, you’re building yourself an additional phonology module.

Kewl, huh!

Coke Contra Mundum!!!

What part of the country do you live in?

Me? I’m from Coke country, and proud of it!

I’m not from one of those bluestate "pop" or "soda" regions.

What am I talking about?

The generic term that is colloquially used for carbonated beverages, of course!

Coke, pope, and soda are the three dominant terms.

The county I was born in was a dark-red Coke county. The county I grew up in was a dark-red Coke county. And the county I expect to retire to (where my family cattle ranch is located) is almost certainly a dark-red Coke county (but the population is so small that nobody there has yet voted in this online survey).

When I was a boy, you might offer someone a Coke saying, "What kind of Coke would you like? I’ve got Pepsi, Mountain Dew, and Dr. Pepper."

So when it comes to describing carbonated beverages in a colloquial manner, I’m a Coke man. When I’m at the supermarket and I’ve got three 12-packs of Caffeing Free Diet Dr. Pepper and three 12-packs of Diet Sunkist orange drink, I tell the cashier that "I’ve got three of both kinds of Coke."

They always know what I mean, even here in sunny "soda" southern California.

Here’s the nationwide map:

Totalcounty

CLICK THIS LINK TO VISIT THE HOMEPAGE OF THIS IMAGE

Once you’re there, you can click the state to find out the totals for the county you live (/were born) in!

Then, join the Coke revolution!

Coke . . . It’s The Real Thing. . . . Coke Is It!

All the major forms of Coke. (Coke, Pepsi, Dr. Pepper, etc., were invented in Coke country, y’know!)

(Cowboy hat tip: Gleeful Extremist.)

Half Done?

Okay, welcome to 2005!

You likely think that this means that the present decade is half over.

Actually, it doesn’t. ‘Member that whole "fake millennium begins in 2000 but real millennium begins in 2001" thing?

Same deal.

The first half of the current decade is 2001-2005, and the second half is 2006-2010 ("The Year We Make Contact"–better study Jupiter while you can, boys!).

Nevertheless, despite calendrical proprieties, in an important psychological sense, decades start as soon as the number in the tens column changes, so the 1960s were from 1960-1969, not 1961-1970. 1970 just can’t be part of the ’60s. Sorry.

So, by that reckoning, we’re half done.

But . . . what decade are we half done with?

This resurrects a question that plagued a lot of people back around 1999: What were we going to call the next decade? We knew, then, that we were living in the ’90s, but what came next? The Nothings? The Zeroes? What?

Some folks had the foresight–or perhaps we should say, the hindsight–to look back at what happened last time this phenomenon happened, between 1900 and 1909. What did people do with that decade?

Actually, they didn’t do anything. They somehow got through the decade without a standardized name for it and, afterwards, managed to not name it anyway. They might talk about specific years–"Back in ’02, ’04, ’08, or whatever"–but the decade as a whole had no name.

It seems we’re in the middle (literally!) of doing the same thing.

We’ve got half way through the decade with no name for it and seem to be doing just fine. When we get to the tens or teens (of the 21st century), we may start calling it "the previous decade," and when we get to the twenties, we may start speaking of "the first decade of this century," a phrase which would be good through 2100 (the last year of this century, ‘member).

Or maybe not.

Who knows?

I just look forward to the time when we’re all old geezers who can upbraid our whipper-snapper grandchildren by telling them things like:

<creaky old-geezer voice>"Why, I remember back in Aught-Five, just after the second President Bush won re-election and the blue staters, who later seceded from the Union and good riddance to ’em, were so consarned mad because of the moral values issue that the red staters were all hopped up about! Don’t they teach you young ‘uns anything in school these days???"</creaky old geezer voice>

They won’t even know what we’re talking about. (Tee-hee! That’s part of the fun of being old!)

What I want to know is: Did people in 1899 stress about what the next decade would be called?

Latin Study Tool Creation?

A reader writes:

Hi Jimmy,

I’m a big fan of yours.  There are certainly a lot of vocabulary
resources for NT Greek, but I’ve never seen a Latin vocabulary
frequency list for the Vulgate (in book form, any way).  Do you know
of one?

I’m afraid I don’t, but would love to have one.

For those who may not know, a word frequency list is a list of which words are most common in a given text or language. These lists are invaluable study tools for people trying to learn a language because, by studying the most common words first, you will be able to speak or read the language much quicker.

For example, if you were learning English, you would be advised to start by learning words like "the," "is," "house," and "blue" rather than words like "triumphalistically," "absquatulate," "boll-weevil," and "chartreuse." If you focus on learning the latter kind of words first, it will be a looooong time before you start understanding ordinary sentences.

People in recent years have created word frequency lists for the Greek New Testament and the Hebrew Old Testament and the Aramaic part of the Old Testament and the Septuagint (if I am not mistaken) and a whole bunch of other texts. They have made learning these langauges much easier.

Unfortunatley, I don’t know of one for the Vulgate. If anyone out there does, please use the comments box to tell us!

Barring that, I should mention that a few years ago I took some steps toward creating such a word frequency list for the Neo-Vulgate (New Testament, if I recall correctly) but was unable to finish the project. I still have the files, and they could be converted into such a list (and into something even more useful), but I don’t have the time to complete it myself. I’d need help.

The problem is that Latin is a highly inflected language, meaning its words change form a lot. The frequency list that I have is of inflected forms, which is no good for learning–at least not the way traditional courses work. To convert it into a usable list, a person (or group of persons) or a computer program would have to go down the list and uninflect the words (that is, put them back into the dictionary form students need to memorize) and then combine the resulting word totals.

This is something that could be done by machine. In fact, I already know of a program that will parse Latin words for you, and part of that means giving the dictionary form of the word. It would be possible to largely automate the process–likely using the parsing program I already know about–but I don’t have the programming skills needed to pull the pieces together.

If someone (or someones) out there do and would like to take a crack at this, use the comments box or e-mail me.

Incidentaly, it would be possible to use the list to create something even more useful–a morphologically tagged Neo-Vulgate. This would assign a code to each word of the Vulgate New Testament that contains its parsing information. Such things already exist for the Greek New Testament and the Hebrew & Aramaic Old Testament, and they are useful for people trying to figure out hard word forms. Nothing like it exists for the Vulgate (so far as I know), but with the right programmer and a couple of people who speak Latin, it would be possible to construct one far more easily than in the past.

Either of these two projects could also lead to other helpful learning tools that exist for Greek and Hebrew but not for Latin.

If anyone out there would be able and interested in helping out with any of this, lemme know!

 

All Your Gifts Are Belong To Us!

Aybabtu_1 Yesterday I posted an Engrish Christmas greeting from Japan.

Down yonder, our first three commenters riffed on this by quoting and adapting different aspects of the most famous Engrish of them all:

"All your base are belong to us."

In case you missed it when this was all the rage on the Internet, FIND OUT WHAT THIS IS ALL ABOUT.

Funny stuff!

I can’t help chuckling at the part where guys put the saying up around town and it gets misinterpreted as an alarming threat in a post-9/11 world.

In case you don’t know what Engrish is, FIND OUT THAT, TOO and VISIT THE MAIN ENGRISH SITE.

Language Learning Strategies

Down yonder, a reader writes:

Jimmy, you write that one only needs to learn to read a Biblical language.

I’m inclined to differ, I would have learned Greek far better, had I
learned to -speak- it, likewise with Hebrew, save that far less of it
stuck. Most of my classmates had been engineers, and the learning was
directed toward purely left-brained, list-learning thinkers.

But that isn’t how humans learn and use language. I tend to suspect
– strongly? that we’d understand the Bible better if we could actually
speak it, read it aloud and understand it, and thereby better catch
nuances and emphases that grammatical commentaries – such as the blue
one from the Vatican, as helpful as they can be – can enable us to do.

Treating the text as computer code may, I am inclined to think,
cause us to misinterpret from time to time. Think of Shakespeare, or
Donne.

What think you?

I agree that a person will learn a langauge better if he learns how to speak it (meaning "knows how to generate his own sentences in it") rather than just understand it (meaning "knowing what a person or a text is saying").

I think it’s a very good thing for students to learn to speak a language as well as understand it, and as they progress in their knowledge of the language, they should learn to do so.

In my article, though, I was concerned with encouraging students who are just beginning in a language. When one is at this stage, most people are so intimidated that they simply quit trying to learn the language. It is imperative, therefore, to do everything possible to make the process less intimidating until the student gains the sense that he really does have the ability to master a language.

One way of doing that is not demanding that beginning students immediately learn sentence generation. The ability to generate sentences is not the goal of biblical language studies; the understanding of biblical texts is. The quicker the students get the satisfaction of understanding texts, the more they will be motivated to continue their studies.

Learning sentence generation is of benefit to students, but in my judgment it’s better not to tax beginners with this.

How Did “Liberal” Become A Bad Word?

HISTORIAN JOHN LUCAKS ANSWERS THIS QUESTION.

As to why it happened, the nut of his answer is this:

Beneath these political and ideological sentiments there was the sense,
more or less apparent, of a general disappointment with liberal ideals.
There was the inclination, sometimes fatal, of liberals to take the
ideas of the Enlightenment to extremes: to propagate a public morality
devoid of, if not altogether opposed to, religion; to insist more and
more on institutionalizing the promotion of justice, at times even at
the expense of truth; to emphasize freedom of speech, often at the
expense of thought; to make abortion legal; to approve same-sex
marriages and affirmative action.

To an increasing mass of Americans, "liberal" began to mean — rightly
or wrongly — a toleration, if not a promotion, of what many considered
to be immoralities.

That’s why it happened, but the context of when and how it happened is most interesting.

CHECK IT OUT.