Glossographia

The plan

2008-05-11T17:58:11Z

Last year, I made a post where I discussed the possibility of using a new LJ community, glossographia, for my language-oriented posts to the Phrontistery, while retaining forthright for other purposes. My concern at that time was that readers of the Phrontistery were using the blog for one reason while all my LJ friends were there for different reasons. Ultimately, no one on my friends list really cared one way or the other so I scrapped that idea.

Now I am in a slightly different situation, namely that I'm about to be employed as a linguistic anthropologist at Wayne State, and my thoughts have been turning to the notion of academic blogging. It's something I've wanted to try for years, but the lack of stability in my employment situation coupled with the various business of life (e.g. Arthur, the job search, etc.) stood in the way. But starting in the fall, I'll be on a reduced teaching load for two years and won't have to spend hundreds of hours putting together job applications, and I'll be re-defining my academic work in any case. I've also seen some of the success junior scholars have had with academic blogging, and I have a big advantage, namely a well-established site in the Phrontistery.

I started the Phrontistery as a Geocities site way back in 1996 (alas, there is no web archive of those early days¹, although the 2001 version here has a similar homepage). At that time I had just started grad school, and envisioned the site as a general resource not only for obscure word lists, but more generally for essays and written material on linguistics, history, archaeology, and social theory. This was of course before there was a word 'blog', and I certainly didn't know what I was doing. Over time, the 'word list' function became more important on the site, although never its exclusive role.

So now, here we are 12 years later, still in the same city (after a brief hiatus), but worlds apart, and am seriously thinking of re-tooling the Phrontistery to be once again (if it ever was) a true thinking-place, by which I now mean an academic blog where I would post on issues close to my research and teaching interests. There are a few interesting linguistic anthropology blogs out there, but the 'market' certainly isn't saturated by any means. In fact some of the issues I'd want to deal with - literacy and writing systems, cognitive anthropology, language and prehistory - are covered poorly if at all.

So I'll be starting a new blog on the Phrontistery (probably using Wordpress) over the next few months. This journal isn't going anywhere - for everyday purposes, LJ will still be my home and the forthright journal will remain active. Beyond that, though, one option would be to maintain two language-related blogs (one for English wordplay and the pronunciation polls, and the other for academic matters) and another would be to simply have a single blog serving all these functions. I'm leaning towards the latter option, but I'm also cognizant that the average Phrontistery visitor may not have a great deal of interest in my ruminations on academic matters. I'll figure that out once we're settled in Windsor.

(1) In its earliest incarnation, the site would automatically play a MIDI version of Handel's 'Harmonious Blacksmith', which would then restart every time you clicked on a link. I kid you not. That only lasted a very short time, thankfully.

Why I am not a libertarian, part 1,000,000

2008-04-30T17:24:18Z

If this article is accurate - my first take on it was that it had to be some sort of horrible hoax - then screw you, Larry Niven, you nutjob. All of us associated in any way with the SF community ought to be outraged. SIGMA is a group of largely libertarian-leaning SF authors who are providing conceptual advice to the US Dept. of Homeland Security. This in itself is moderately troubling, but now we have this, from Ringworld author Larry Niven, at a Homeland Security conference last month:

Niven said a good way to help hospitals stem financial losses is to spread rumors in Spanish within the Latino community that emergency rooms are killing patients in order to harvest their organs for transplants.

“The problem [of hospitals going broke] is hugely exaggerated by illegal aliens who aren’t going to pay for anything anyway,” Niven said.

So, we have a prominent libertarian SF writer advocating the use of federal funds from one government agency to propagandistically spread the lie that another, underfunded public service is intentionally killing citizens, thereby reducing 'waste' while further assuming that most Spanish-speakers in the country are illegal immigrants. Tell you what, you dumb shit, why don't we just cut out the middleman and use Homeland Security's funding to shore up the health care system.

I don't think that lying about inefficiencies in health care is typical of all or most libertarians - in fact, any real libertarian (including the many on my friends list) should be able to see in a moment that this is the exact opposite of libertarianism and in fact is the worst sort of racist, underhanded, mean-spirited bile one can possibly imagine. Not to mention that what the hell does Homeland Security have to do with eliminating waste in the hospital system? Oh right, I forgot, that's because brown people = illegal immigrants = terrorists.

If you want to understand why many of us on the political left are skeptical of libertarianism, this is it, in a nutshell. In this crowd at least, any intrusion into public life, any violation of common decency, any lie or misdirection, and indeed any government action is justifiable if it is perceived as saving a dollar here or there, because God forbid that anyone should have to pay taxes, or feel obliged to help those in need.

While it would be easy to write this off as just some guy saying something that (one would hope) would never be put into practice, Niven is highly esteemed in many circles and I don't doubt that any number of small-minded bureaucrats and officials will see this hate-filled wankery as sensible practice.

How to find me

2008-04-30T15:18:43Z

I admit that writing a 'how to find me' post that will only be read by people who have already found me may seem counterproductive, but just to clarify, for those who are uncertain how best to reach me online:

I am available on Livejournal (of course). I can always be reached at my livejournal.com email address, which redirects to my main email, or of course you can comment on posts.

You can find me on Facebook under my real name, Stephen Chrisomalis. I made a decision long ago that I didn't really want to hide my identity, and that trying to maintain a true pseudonym online was ultimately inimical to my privacy. So you can find me there. I use FB mainly to keep in touch with various people who aren't on LJ; all my main blogging goes on here (at least right now). It is to some extent a professional presence insofar as I have some of my better / more interesting students on my friends list over there.

I am always accessible at the Phrontistery and at my phrontistery.info email address, which is currently my main email. It isn't going anywhere.

I use Stumbleupon, where my username is the same as here. I have a huge backlog of interesting sites that I've been meaning to bookmark, blog about, and add to an as-yet-solely-conceptual blogroll.

I do have various other email and internet accounts (gmail, hotmail, Sympatico mail, some blogging accounts, social bookmarking, librarything, etc.) which are dormant, being used as placeholders, or otherwise generally defunct. I don't check them or use them regularly, and they aren't reliable means of reaching me.

I don't give out my phone or home address openly but they aren't hard to find if you know my name. In any case they will be changing shortly due to my upcoming move.

Bad, until ...

2008-04-28T19:11:45Z

Pretty crappy day start to today ... We're both feeling pretty cruddy about the move and the dislocation of all our friendships, our social ties, etc., as we go to Detroit-Windsor. Marking ... meh, so-so at best, they just aren't flowing as fast as I would like. Dealing with administrative teaching-related claptrap this afternoon didn't help. Still raining.

Then I get an email about fifteen minutes ago informing me that I have been awarded the McGill Arts Undergraduate Society's annual Excellence in Teaching Award. And apparently there will be some sort of reception ... I guess ... I guess my students must have nominated me, and ... ah shit now I am happy, and melancholy, and overjoyed, and so grateful.

Public(k) service announcement

2008-04-25T01:27:49Z

Please note: The trailer for Season 3 of The Venture Bros. is now out and is completely awesome. If you haven't seen the show, the trailer will give you only 7/16 of the pleasure it gave me (Note: This figure is SCIENTIFIC FACT), but you may also consider yourself on notice that you are missing the best comedic show on television. Season 3 airs starting June 1! Whee!

We have a house (almost)

2008-04-18T01:48:52Z

Yesterday we drove 8 hours from Montreal to Windsor (less than the 10 I figured it would be) and basically crashed from exhaustion. This morning we met our broker at 8:30am, started seeing houses at 9 and then worked through a seemingly endless series of houses, mostly in the southern region of Windsor called Devonshire Heights. By 3:00 we were convinced we had seen everything in the city that met our criteria, and after a couple of revisits, were ready to place an offer by 5:00. (Julie will post more on the househunt and the 'loser houses' momentarily). After writing up the contract in a mall food court, our broker took the offer to the seller about an hour ago, and then just met with us at Tim Horton's (one of over 30 in the city!) to present their very reasonable counteroffer, which we signed on the spot and made a deposit.

So, details: It's 8 years old, a 4 bedroom, 2 full baths, with a very big kitchen with an island, cathedral ceilings on the main floor living room/dining room, hardwood floors upstairs and laminate below, a huge family room downstairs, a garage, air conditioning. The neighbourhood is a quiet residential neighbourhood, which will take some adjustment, but is exactly what we were looking for. It is basically the best house we saw all day even though it was middle-to-low in the price range of houses we saw today (some people think *much* too highly of their property). Contingent on financing (which is not a big deal because it is *well* under our maximum price) we take possession May 30 and move early in June.

Woohoo!

But what do you call Cthulhu?

2008-04-15T02:45:08Z

As you may know, one of Arthur's favourite bath toys (and in fact, one of his first 100 words) is Cthulhu the octopus-like Great Old One:

Today for the first time, Arthur announced unprovoked that 'Cthulhu is an octopus' which is of course what any sane parents would have told him it was two years ago. Ah well, sanity was never one of my strong points ...

Also, he is under the impression that he can type his name into the front of his books where it says "This book belongs to __________________________" or whatever. Do you suppose he spends a bit of time on the computer?

Three words

2008-04-09T00:58:57Z

Ah, my boy ... warped by the media already:

Arthur: "Those three words sound the same."
Julie: "Which three words?"
Arthur: "Nickelodeon, Nick Jr., and the other Nick Jr."

Screw you, Hampstead!

2008-04-05T20:35:15Z

So I have just spent the past 6 hours in the wonderful town of Hampstead, Quebec, as well as northwestern parts of the neighbouring borough of Cote-de-Neiges/Notre-Dame-de Grace, and a couple of weird little slivers of Cote-Saint-Luc. Why, you may ask? I and three brave students from my Arch Methods class, together comprising Team Valiant, spent the day wandering about documenting and photographing stop signs as part of our ongoing project, Stop: Toutes Directions, in which we are documenting stop signs across a huge swath of Montreal. Needless to say, while the urban planners who modelled Hampstead after the eponymous area of London may have meant well, by the end we were cursing them and their insanely curved streets and bizarre street naming practices and tendency to put stop signs in the middle of streets for no particular reason. On the other hand, 179 stop signs in 6 hours at 71 intersections is not half bad! Fortunately it was a beautiful day (I went around most of the afternoon in just a sweater) and Team Valiant did their work with few complaints.

What we need more of is science

2008-04-04T00:45:31Z

Arthur is starting to figure out the phonetic basis of writing. Of course he can read all the names of his favourite shows, words like 'Menu' and 'Go' that appear on his favourite web sites, and phrases like 'Bonus Features' from his growing DVD collection. But the other day at game, sorceror wrote 'HI ARTHUR' on the little magnetic writing board we have for him and asked him what H-I spelled, to which he sensibly replied: /hɪ/ (like 'hit' without the t). Then today he was reading the name of one of his favourite shows, Hi-5, and pronounced it /haj fajv/, and then hypercorrected to /hɪ fajv/.

I rue the day I ever taught him the word 'experiment'; he is now insistent on 'experimenting' with soap and water every night in the bath. How is a scientist such as myself supposed to react when his toddler, resisting the end of bathtime, wails "Nononono! More experimenting! More experimenting!"

Although maybe he'll be an architect. He was reading one of my copies of Archaeology magazine (which sit in the bathroom next to his potty-time books) with Julia the other day and she was showing him an article entitled 'How to build a pyramid'. Arthur asked what the words said, and when Julia told him, he replied sensibly, "You put the top on it."

Although space exploration is also popular. He's a big fan of Google Earth, which he calls 'the planet'. But recently he was frustrated with the program for some reason and cried out "I wanna go to a different planet!"

Dollarware!

2008-03-23T23:16:41Z

Over the past several weeks, my senior class and I have been working on, and have now completed, The Dollarware Project. What on earth is that, you may ask? Nothing less than the world's first scholarly archaeological analysis of discount store ceramic drinking vessels, that's what.

I'm just astonished at how much time and energy the class was able and willing to put into a project that was worth only 40% of their term mark. Honestly I hadn't expected anything like this kind of response, and as far as I can tell few people burned out even towards the end of the project. The projects range in length up to 9000 words of text (!!) and their quality matches their quantity. I'm also very pleased at the wide range of approaches and methodologies, quantitative and qualitative, used to examine an incredible diversity of research questions in fascinating ways.

Anyway, I'm sure that *something* there is of interest to many of you; to get a better sense of the projects you could read my editorial introduction which briefly describes each of the individual reports. Let me know what you think!

I'll plamp that in your pipple-whipple!

2008-03-20T13:08:36Z

Arthur is the coiner of three new words: slown (rhymes with frown), plamp, and pipple-whipple, all of which he finds incredibly amusing. All that is required now is for you, my dear readers, to supply the definitions for these exciting neologisms.

Paleo-notation

2008-03-19T13:45:41Z

This term, my students and I engaged in a collective bibliography assignment entitled Bibliorama!, in which we independently collected bibliographic sources on the subject of Paleolithic numerals/tallies/calendars. I have now collated the students' projects (and my own 'grading key') into one large file into the Paleolithic Notation Bibliography. I have also taken the opportunity to re-organize the Phrontistery sidebar to group together all my various materials related to my academic work on numeration, giving it a more prominent place on the site. Let me know what you think!

Les arthurismes

2008-03-17T03:40:46Z

Arthur finally seems to be picking up at least a smattering of French. He said 'C'est bon' at least once recently, and knows at least the names of a few words and song titles (e.g. 'Alouette') that they sing at day care. Of course, he got very upset when I actually started singing the aforementioned song, shrieking, "You don't like it in Frenchie! You don't like it in Frenchie!" (He still says 'you don't like it' for 'I don't like it' although his command of the first person is significantly improved otherwise, and I presume that in Frenchie is what passes for a toddler loan-translation of en français). Had me howling in laughter, though.

I wonder who has done research on toddlers' use of simile and metaphor. This evening when I was giving him his bath, we were playing with a mostly-empty liquid soap bottle that I had refilled with soapy water. He was squirting it on himself and I said "You're making a soap waterfall"; shortly thereafter, in contrast, he remarked, "I'm making it like a soap waterfall."

Huh?

2008-03-02T00:07:12Z

Arthur, looking at a photo on the NY Times website: "It's a baseball picture, full of football players playing hockey."

Bilingualism on the cheap

2008-02-27T23:30:25Z

Arthur (counting the salad bowls he has just 'helpfully' brought to the supper table): One, two, three, four.
Me: Can you count them in French?
Arthur (pauses): Uno ... dos ... tres ... cuatro ... Just like Handy Manny!

So in conclusion, we have been sending Arthur to a French-only daycare for six months now, to no effect, but a few hours of watching a TV show (and its accompanying website) have taught him to count in Spanish.

In other news, his pre-literacy skills proceed apace. He now has pretty good whole word recognition for a wide variety of words and especially the names of his favourite web sites and shows, and words from his favourite stories, which he identifies even when out of context / not in their original font - e.g., on the satellite TV channel listing. He knows how to use Google well enough to type in the first letter of whatever site he wants and then pick the right one from the list that pops up, and then click the search button. I have no idea what else he can do ... should I be worried? :)

Serif

2008-02-26T18:42:56Z

At long last, the pronunciation polls return. We'll ease into it with something simple (although I have a notorious reputation for turning simple polls into complex ones):

View Poll: Serif

Last 10 pronunciation polls | All previous polls | Pronunciation polls with analytical essays | Dialect survey

Ske-babble

2008-02-09T00:40:57Z

Wow, it has been over a month since I made a post with some language-related content here. I should really remedy that! Two things:

1) Yesterday I got my first mention in Language Log, largely because I had never bothered to email any of the linguists who blog there before.

2) Arthur has learned the word 'skedaddle'. curtana was mentioning this fact to our friend owldaughter the other day in range of Arthur's hearing, at which point he interjected, "I call it skedabble". He's right about that; this is actually how he pronounces it. But his statement shows evidence of metalinguistic thought: he is aware that his pronunciation is not the standard - he's not just mishearing it or not producing it correctly, but he actually has given thought to the difference between the way that we pronounce it and the way he does. Fascinating.

Birthday greetings

2008-01-06T01:17:34Z

Happy birthday to mousme, Capricorn extraordinaire! May this year be fruitful and successful for you!

Syntax: administrators and idiots

2007-12-17T21:05:12Z

When we think about language change, it's often neologisms (newly coined words) that catch our attention. New slang and new terms for technology are perceptually highly salient - they catch our attention and arouse our ire. I've been guilty of this from time to time, as in my abortive Words I Hate series featuring such classics as winningest, biopic, and herbaceutical, and even recently I've complained about consumerology and brownulate. But they aren't the most significant aspects of linguistic change. At least 95% of the words in this entry (excepting the last sentence) have been in the language for hundreds of years, and, as a raw count (i.e. not eliminating duplicates) at least 50% of the words are Anglo-Saxon. And, as I pointed out earlier this year, the annual Banished Words List picks on neologisms mercilessly, when in fact these are largely hardly objectionable except in a subjective sense.

Similarly, although I find new ones virtually every week, my ongoing series of pronunciation polls reflects only a very limited set of words that exhibit variation in their pronunciation outside the normal dialect differences in vowel quality, r-pronouncing, etc. But because it's an issue of pronunciation, and because humans are cognitively attuned to hear various phonemic distinctions in their own languages, once again, they're very obvious.

Syntax, however, is a trickier issue. On the surface, syntactic change seems less significant than other types of linguistic change, because we can almost always sort out the meaning of a sentence even if the word order or phrasing seems a bit archaic. "He sleeps not" is now non-standard, but of course for centuries this formation was a completely standard way to express negation in English, and is in fact considerably more concise than "He does not sleep". Nevertheless, you have only to read closely a little bit of seventeenth or eighteenth (or even nineteenth)-century literature to notice syntactic differences. One of the real challenges I have in my Evolutionary Anthropology course, where we read Darwin's The Descent of Man, is to get the students to slow down and read closely, because if they don't then the language can just wash over them and they will miss important points.

Which brings me to the poll I ran a couple of weeks ago, asking for your input on the correctness of six sample sentences (three pairs that only differ in one point). Bear in mind that I hate syntax, and that it is one of the only reasons why I chose anthropology (with a somewhat linguistic focus) instead of linguistics as a major and eventually a profession. So the analysis that follows may in fact be error-ridden.

To recap, here are the six sentences:

(1) He showed that the administrators were idiots.
(2) He showed how the administrators were idiots.

(3) The administrators who he thought were clever were actually idiots.
(4) The administrators he thought were clever were actually idiots.

(5) He prevented the administrator from being an idiot.
(6) He prevented the administrator being an idiot.

That vs. How
Unsurprisingly (to me), over three-quarters of you agreed that 1 and 2, while both acceptable, mean different things. I agree - to me, 1 means that the subject demonstrated the fact of their idiocy, while 2 means that he showed the manner in which they were idiots. However, in informal speech 2 is actually reasonably common, and I have noticed it increasingly in student papers in sentences like, "He showed how Piltdown Man was actually a hoax committed by Sir Arthur Keith" in a context where the relative pronoun how can only reasonably be interpreted as meaning that he demonstrated the fact, not the means by which, the hoax was committed. In the poll, all of the other responses were chosen by only a few people, so I'm not able to say for sure whether this is a growing trend, but anecdotal evidence from student papers suggests that it is. I have to be careful, though, not to fall prey to the recency illusion. Even if it is very rare in published texts from the past, the same is true of published texts from the present - I have only encountered it in speech and in student papers, neither of which I have access to from the past.

Whom vs. Who vs. That vs. Nothing
Hee hee! I knew it would be a free-for-all in the comments when I wrote sentences 3 and 4, because I intentionally omitted the following:
(7) The administrators whom he thought were clever were actually idiots.
(8) The administrators that he thought were clever were actually idiots.
You will find that in speech and informal writing, 7 is vanishingly rare and getting rarer, while 3, 4, and 8 are all popular to some degree. In writing, 7 is more common but 3, 4, and 8 are also common. Any number of you will insist that 'that' should never be used as a relative pronoun to refer to humans, or that 'whom' or 'who' is absolutely required in this context. You're wrong. You're wrong not because 8 is correct, but because all of these are so common among the best English writers of the past 500 years that it's hard to see the standard by which 'wrong' would possibly be judged. You can't even apply the 'replace the relative clause with a pronoun' rule to decide between who/whom in this case. This isn't some loosey-goosey descriptivism, mind you: it reflects actual usage, true, but not just 'any old usage' - it's the usage of trained, educated, skilled writers who pay attention to their writing, and *still* there is variability. This is because, like it or not, the Big Book of English Grammar school of thought is dead, dead, dead, and really hasn't ever been alive. For the record, and setting aside the restrictive vs. non-restrictive clause issue in terms of comma placement, I use all of these, but probably 4 most of all. The absence of a relative pronoun here is unproblematic and standard. In fact, I wonder whether the reason I find it pleasing is that it avoids the whom/who/that issue entirely, and thus is inoffensive to all (well, except for the 13% of you who think that 4 is acceptable only informally, or the one person who holds that 4 is incorrect).

From-Deletion
One of Arthur's books contains the following sentence:
(9) The scarecrow tries to stop them eating Farmer Sparrow's seeds!
In formal contexts, I would say or write stop them from eating, but in informal conversational contexts, I may well delete the preposition. In our sample sentences 5 and 6, 'stop them' is analogous to 'prevented the administrator' and 'eating' is analogous to 'being'; I'm not sure whether it makes a difference, though. But clearly you found 5 far more acceptable than 6; over half of you found only 5 acceptable, and another sixth found 6 to be okay only in informal contexts; conversely, no one found only 6 acceptable. I'm having a hard time figuring out exactly what the trick is here. It may have something to do with the verb 'prevent', but I don't think so. It may have to do with assumptions about the deleted preposition, which could create a semantic difficulty (e.g. 'from being an idiot' vs. 'while (he was) being an idiot'. Or it may have something to do with the phrase 'being an idiot', but again, I don't think so. But then again, I am an idiot (relatively) when it comes to sorting out these problems, and someone will have to stop me (from) being obsessed with the question.

(For the record, though: I don't think that all administrators are idiots!)

More quotation follies

2007-12-16T23:33:30Z

OK, so now the New York Times is getting into the game of single quotations in article titles:

Clinton Invites Voters to 'Inspect' Her

Although in this case, it is an actual word used in a quotation by Clinton. I would have preferred something like: Clinton to Voters: 'Inspect Me'. And it still sounds all a little bit kinky to me.

Fission: analysis

2007-12-16T21:08:18Z

In English, virtually all the words ending in -ission are standardly pronounced [ɪʃɘn] with the unvoiced [ɪ] 'sh' sound: mission, commission, emission, omission, permission, and fission (the subject of this poll). They are largely the noun forms of -mit verbs; there is obviously no verb mit but there is a Latin verb mittere, from which all the -mission words are derived. In fact, generalizing even further, virtually all the words ending in -ssion are pronounced [ʃɘn], regardless of the preceding vowel.

Conversely, words ending in -ision are standardly pronounced [ɪʒɘn], with the voiced [ʒ] 'zh' sound: vision, elision, decision, division, derision, etc. These are Latin-derived words, and in English are largely noun forms of -ide verbs. In fact, generalizing even further, all the words ending in Vsion (where V is any vowel) are pronounced [ʒɘn], regardless of the preceding vowel.

It might therefore be surprising that around 40% of you (including me) pronounce fission along the pattern of vision [ɪʒɘn], and another 10% do so sometimes. While all dictionaries list the 'sh' pronunciation as primary, several North American dictionaries list 'zh' as an alternative. While British speakers nearly all use the 'sh' pronunciation, Americans and Canadians are completely divided on the matter. Why, then, would this variant have emerged, and why would it be so popular?

Fission is unusual among -ission verbs in that it is not etymologically connected to mittere (obviously, since it doesn't have an M in it), and the verb fit is unconnected to fission. Instead it comes from the Latin fissio, a form of the verb findere 'to split'. It was borrowed in the 17th century, a period of numerous borrowings from Latin out of a desire to add gravitas to the vox populi. Today, it is most often encountered in scientific contexts, most notably in nuclear physics, in contrast to fusion. Here, then, is one potential source of the irregularity: because fusion and fission pattern together, perhaps fission is pronounced with the voiced fricative 'zh' due to interference from fusion [fju:ʒɘn]. There is no positive evidence for this hypothesis, but I think it definitely may play a role.

There is also a noun scission 'division, split' (and a few derivatives thereof like rescission) that are pronounced [ɪʒɘn]. Scission is etymologically related to scissors, which is interesting in its own right because it's one of the only words in which -ss- is pronounced voiced, as [z]. It is also interesting that fission and scission are essentially synonymous. However, none of this comes even close to an explanation for the unusual pronunciation of fission; most English speakers are probably not even aware that scission is a word.

Let's go a bit broader and look at the letters/sounds preceding -sion. As indicated above, Vsion words are always pronounced 'zh' while ssion words are pronounced 'sh'. But what about other consonants? As it turns out, -nsion words (tension, mansion) and -lsion words (propulsion, revulsion) are pronounced 'sh', while -rsion words (version, incursion) are usually pronounced 'zh', patterning with the vowels, and none of the other consonants precede -sion. This leaves us with 'zh': -asion, -esion, -ision, -osion, -usion, -rsion versus 'sh': -nsion, -lsion, -ssion. However, there are one or two exceptions: torsion is pronounced with 'sh', and sometimes, so is immersion (although I don't do so, I've heard it). Could this make a difference with fission? I don't really think so, but it does demonstrate that there is at least a little bit of variability in the otherwise ironclad pattern of -sion words.

Short answer: we don't really know why this should be; it's a bit of an outlier.

Now, on to fissure. Fissure is etymologically related to fission, of course, but isn't derived from it. It came into English in the 14th century from Middle French and ultimately from the Latin noun fissura. Also, unlike fission, it is often used in all sorts of non-scientific contexts, and has an almost literary quality. Like fission, it is standardly pronounced with the unvoiced 'sh' (as [fɪʃɘɹ], but again, there is some variability: nearly a quarter of you pronounce it with 'zh', as [fɪʒɘɹ]. My suspicion is that this variant is a result of the variability in fission rather than an independent development. Let's do the same thing with -sure words as we did with -sion:

'sh': sure, assure, ensure, insure, unsure, censure, erasure, fissure, pressure, reassure, tonsure
'zh': closure, leisure, measure, exposure, pleasure, treasure, composure, enclosure, disclosure

We can see that there is a very similar pattern: after consonants (other than R) the S is pronounced 'sh', while after vowels and R it is pronounced 'zh', with the only exceptions being partial: erasure and fissure can be pronounced either way (though most often 'sh'). Erasure should always be pronounced with 'zh', according to the pattern, but generally isn't, but this isn't entirely surprising, because erase is pronounced with the unvoiced [s], whereas close, compose, please, etc. are pronounced with the voiced [z]. In any event, erasure is far too uncommon to be able to influence fissure. The 'sh' variants are more common anyway, for both erasure and fissure. Also, fissure with 'zh' is less common than fission with 'zh'. Thus, I think it is most likely that fissure with 'zh' originated on the model of fission with 'zh' rather than the othe way around.

A couple of respondents, primarily Canadian and British English speakers, correctly noted that 'fissure' and 'wisher' don't necessarily rhyme even if you pronounce both words with 'sh', because the last vowel is slightly diphthongized, so that the word is pronounced something like [fɪʃʊɘɹ] 'Fish-yooer' or [fɪzʊɘɹ] 'Fiz-yooer' or even [fɪsjʊɘɹ] 'Fiss-yooer'. This gets into some complicated issues in phonetics, but doesn't affect the general issue of variability between the voiceless 'sh' and the voiced 'zh'. Finally, it's worth noting that the adjective fissile is always pronounced with the unvoiced [s], never [z] 'Fizz-ile', although there is another issue, namely whether the second syllable is pronounced [ajl] 'fiss-isle' or [ɘl] 'fiss-le'. But that is a completely different issue, and one that I will address in a future poll.

On that subject, due to the nearness of the Christmas holidays, this will be the last poll for 2007. I'll try to put up some analysis posts on those syntax polls I did on a lark last week, but otherwise, thank you all, whether regular or occasional respondents, for your participation, and see you in 2008!

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Poll: Did he win the race?

2007-12-14T03:31:57Z

I haven't forgotten that I owe you an analytical essay on fission, but to appease you (perhaps), here is a language poll:

View Poll: Did he win the race?

Glottal oatmeal

2007-12-12T17:00:20Z

One of the aspects of English pronunciation that is frequently neglected is the glorious glottal stop [ʔ]. It doesn't have its own letter, and isn't even as prominent as engma [ŋ], which at least has the letters 'ng' to signify it (even if most people think it is made up of 'n' + 'g', which it isn't). And yet virtually every English sentence contains one or more of the suckers, glottally inching their way into our language, making a sound without ever making an impression.

In my dialect of English, glottal stops almost always take the place of /t/ in syllable-final position, especially when followed by another consonant. So, for instance, I pronounce 'oatmeal' as ['ouʔ.miɘɫ]; my tongue isn't anywhere near the position of /t/ at any point in the word. In fact, it almost sounds more like ['ouʔp.miɘɫ] OPE-meal, because at the same time as I'm pronouncing the glottal stop, my lips are closing to produce the bilabial /m/, making a little tiny /p/ at the end of the syllable through phonetic assimilation. I had been aware of this feature of my speech, but I particularly noticed it when Arthur began pronouncing it ['ou.pɘ.miɘɫ] 'OH-puh-meal' or even ['ou.pi.miɘɫ] 'OH-pee-meal', resyllabifying the word to conform with what he was hearing.

Similarly, if you are a native English speaker and can say the word 'Atwater' without blushing, then you probably do not pronounce the first T as [t] but rather as a glottal stop, as ['æʔ.wɑɾɘɹ] - basically, with the T pronounced with your glottis, at the back of your mouth, rather than with the tip of your tongue against the alveolar ridge just behind your front teeth. At best, you say ['æʔt.wɑɾɘɹ], where your tongue is against the alveolar ridge but where the consonant /t/ isn't really pronounced. But no one, with the exception of the lovely automatic (Francophone) voice on the Montreal metro system, pronounces it ['ætwɑtɘɹ] ...

Eeeeee!

2007-12-11T02:39:53Z

In reading this article on the new paleontological discovery of polar bear remains possibly dating to 130-110K, I discovered the word 'Eeemian', referring to one of several interglacial periods in recent history. Alas, it appears to be a typo (although not a unique one) for Eemian. Otherwise, we would have the highly unusual case of a word containing three identical letters in sequence, in particular beginning with three of the same letter.