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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! Last 10 pronunciation polls | All previous polls | Pronunciation polls with analytical essays | Dialect surveyTags: language, wp
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Extraordinary looks like it should be pronounced with six syllables, i.e., as a simple combination of extra and ordinary. In fact, however, this pronunciation is rather uncommon; only one person out of 100 respondents indicated that this was their only pronunciation of the word, while 35% of you use it some of the time. Virtually all of the rest of you pronounce it /ɛkstɹɔɹdɪnɛɹi:/ 'ek-STROR-din-air-ee' as if the a in extra were silent. Many English words are spelled with consecutive vowels that cross a morpheme boundary - that is, the first morpheme ends in a vowel and the second begins with one. When this happens, the resulting word often looks like it should have a long vowel or a diphthong, as in proactive, reinvent, or antiestablishment. Most English speakers and readers don't have great difficulty sorting out the morpheme boundaries in such cases, and recognizing, for instance, that 're-invent' rather than 'rein-vent' is intended. Last week we looked at a couple of cases where the vowel combination -oo- was reinterpreted as /u:/ in KOO-operate and ZOO-ology. With these two words, though, the syllable structure is preserved, and the change simply alters the vowel of the first syllable. With extraordinary, however, we get a reduction from six to five syllables among most speakers. Here, the vowel combination is -ao-, which doesn't have a standard English pronunciation (it is /au/ in words like Maori, /ei.o/ in words like aorta, /ei.ɔ/ in words like chaos, and don't get me started on pharaoh or gaol). Few words contain the letter sequence –ao-, and even fewer split the sequence at a morpheme boundary (others include supraorbital and intraocular). Now, because extraordinary is a six-syllable word, it's particularly prone to having an unstressed syllable (like the second syllable) elided. It is also common enough in daily speech for such a change to occur and spread widely. Most dictionaries list both the six- and five-syllable variants, and most (including the OED) list the five-syllable version first, indicating that it is more commonly used. With longer formations such as extraordinarily, the likelihood that a speaker is going to elide one (or more) syllables increases. A couple of people mentioned that the sense of the word isn't quite right for them if pronounced with six syllables: it makes it seem as if something is particularly (extra) ordinary, when of course the actual sense is beyond (extra) the ordinary. This semantic ambiguity isn't likely to be the cause of the elision of the vowel, and it isn't likely to cause any real confusion - after all, no one thinks an extraterrestrial is particularly bound to the earth. Potentially, however, the ambiguity may lead some users to avoid the longer version. A few people, primarily British English speakers, responded to say that in fact their pronunciation has only four syllables: ek-STROR-din-ree. It is not unusual in many British dialects (and some other dialects also) for words ending in –ery, -ory, and -ary to be pronounced /ri:/ with the preceding vowel elided. In fact, I think it's possible that as few as two syllables could give you something that is recognizably extraordinary: STRORD-nry /stɹɔɹd.nɹi/. Most of us elide our schwas more than we are willing to admit, and I suspect that four, three, or two-syllable pronunciations are commonplace, particularly in informal contexts. While extraordinary is the only -ao- word that has morphophonemic issues in pronunciation, there are two other -ao- words that exhibit unusual variation. Karaoke is a combination of the Japanese morphemes kara 'empty' and oke (from okesutora, the Japanese version of orchestra). Sometimes in English one hears ka-ra-oh-kay or ka-ra-oh-kee, but the most common variant, kair-ee-oh-kee /keɪɹi:ouki:/ is an anglicization of a Japanese word (which in itself is half English) to conform somewhat with the expectations of English orthography and phonology. The first /i:/ in the anglicization is quite bizarre and irregular, however. The variation is not morphophonemic in English, however, because most English speakers have no idea that it's made up of two morphemes. Cacao similarly comes from a language with highly divergent phonology from our own (in this case, from the Nahuatl cacahuatl, through the intermediary of Spanish), and while I would say ka-KOW /kɘ.kau:/, ka-KAY-oh /kɘ.kei.ou/ is commonly attested in both Britain and North America. It didn't seem interesting enough to warrant a poll in its own right, but it sure is tasty! Last 10 pronunciation polls | All previous polls | Pronunciation polls with analytical essays | Dialect surveyTags: language, wp
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As I mentioned in my poll post, morphophonemics examines the interaction between phonemes (the sounds of a language) and morphemes (the meaning-bearing units of a language). So, for instance, it deals with questions such as the variation in the plural morpheme in English (/s/ as in cats, /z/ as in dogs, /ɪz/ as in horses). In general, though, English doesn't have a lot of regular morphophonemic issues. The words we are examining this week, however, cooperate and zoology, both do. Now, as any six-year-old will tell you, the letters -oo- are usually pronounced /u/ as in food although obviously /ʊ/ as in good is common enough as well. In a word like cooperate, however, which combines the bound morpheme co- with the verb operate, 'oo' spans the morpheme boundary. Normally, then, the word is pronounced /kouɔpɘɹeit/ 'KO-operate', keeping the morpheme 'co-' with its standard pronunciation. However, orthographically this is a bit unorthodox; we see the letters 'oo' and we think 'oo' as in food. From the poll, I learned that around one-sixth of you use the pronunciation KU-operate at least some of the time. It is unsurprising that this should be the case, but it is nonetheless nonstandard. I've been unable to find any dictionary that lists it even as an option. In quick pronunciation, it may be hard to hear the difference, however. This post was actually inspired by a commercial for the Canadian insurance company The Cooperators where the voice-over pronounced the name in the nonstandard way, 'KU-operators'. I'd heard it before, but was a little startled since I knew it was nonstandard. One hypothesis I considered was that if the company regularly used this pronunciation, then Canadians might be more likely than others to use KU-operate, but that hypothesis isn't really supported by the data; there doesn't seem to be any real geographical bias. The other "co-o*" word in regular usage is coordinate, and ... well, I'm not exactly sure why I didn't ask about that one too, except that I also had to ask about zoologist and I wasn't really convinced that it would be particularly different in pattern from cooperate. For me, KU-ordinate sounds rather nonstandard, but not ridiculously so - much like KU-operate, I'm sure it's something I've heard even though I don't use it in my own speech. Now, the other word of interest here, zoology, is fascinating in its own right. Like cooperate, the -oo- sequence spans two morphemes (zo- and -ology). Yet in this case, although several commenters responded to say they had heard the saying "There's no zoo in zoology", fully three-quarters of you say only ZU-ology, and only 15% say only ZO-ology. Obviously, the key here is that there is interference from the English word zoo /zu/ which almost everyone learns as a very little child and which is far more common than any of zoology, zoologist, etc. Zoo began its life as a contraction of zoological in reference to London's Royal Zoological Gardens in the nineteenth century (in fact, the OED still lists zoo as a colloquialism, which is hardly true today). It may be that at some distant point someone pronounced zoo as /zou.ou/ 'ZO-o', but I doubt it. Instead, the 'oo' took on a life of its own as /u/ on the basis of the orthography, and it's been zoo ever since its inception. Now that zoo is so much more common, and learned so much earlier, it's inevitable that there would be some effect on zoology and zoologist. Nevertheless, several style guides continue to rail against ZU-ology - a battle that is almost certainly lost. The only social group likely to prefer ZO-ology consistently are … well, zoologists, and allied life scientists, for whom 'zoo' may actually be less common than the longer forms. Several ZO-ology respondents commented to say that they have some university-level background in the field. Prior to the last fifty years or so, it was commonplace to use a diaeresis - two dots above the second of two vowels in sequence to indicate a syllable marker (not to be confused with an umlaut, two dots over a vowel ( or consonant) to indicate a change in vowel sound) - in words like coöperate and zoölogy, although it was never mandatory to do so. This orthographic convention more or less mandates the pronunciations KO-operate and ZO-ology. Today the diaeresis is found increasingly infrequently (as is true of most English diacritical marks), which permits the nonstandard pronunciations. Another word often formerly spelled with a diaeresis is preeminent (formerly preëminent), but, to my knowledge, it is never pronounced PREE-muh-nent. This is unsurprising, though, because, while KU-operate and ZU-ology retain the same syllabification as KO-operate and ZO-ology, PREE-min-ent reduces the word from four syllables into three. 'Pre-' is already pronounced /pri/ 'PREE', so there's no need to modify it when the morpheme is combined with eminent. For this reason, Charles Elster is misguided in his recent The Big Book of Beastly Mispronounciations (Houghton Mifflin, 2006, p. 413) who rails against ZU-ology by saying that "though no one would dream of saying koo-AHP-ur-ayt and PREE-muh-nint, millions blithely say zoo-AHL-uh-jee." He is wrong about KU-operate, which is obviously used by some people, as the poll suggests; the syllabification issue provides a good explanation for why PREE-muh-nent isn't used. Of course, the other option with coordinate, cooperate and preeminent is to hyphenate them to indicate the morpheme break, but that isn't an option with zoology. In English, hyphens are standardly used to separate prefixes from the rest of words, but with a few exceptions (such as -electand sometimes -like) may not be used to separate suffixes; zo-ology is thus not an option. This one was quite a bit of fun, so I think I'll keep with a similar theme for next week, and see if you'll co(-)öperate with me. Last 10 pronunciation polls | All previous polls | Pronunciation polls with analytical essays | Dialect surveyTags: language, wp
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Sorry for the delay in posting this essay. Life intervenes, etc. So: fungi, magi, foci, and abaci are of course the plurals of fungus, magus, focus, and abacus. These four nouns all end in -gus or -cus, and are all of Latin or Greco-Latin derivation (others include locus/loci, sarcophagus/sarcophagi, and esophagus/esophagi). This irregular -us/-i pluralization represents the fact that all of these are loanwords from the Latin 'second declension' of nouns that follows this pattern. All four of these words show a great deal of pronunciation variability, some of which is common to all four, and some of which is specific to individual words. The pronunciation of these words varies in two specific ways. The first has to do with the consonant sound. In the singular form, the C and G are what is called in elementary school language courses 'hard' C and G, and /k/ and /g/ in linguistics, because the consonants are followed by U. But the irregular plurals end in -gi or -ci, which ought to be pronounced /dʒ/ and /s/, the 'soft' versions because the consonant is followed by an I. These terms, 'hard' and 'soft', aren't exact enough and really are meaningless, but they are a substantial part of the English 'folk phonology' that most of us learn, so I'll use them despite my reservations. Additionally, there is the question of how to pronounce the final I in each word. Most English words ending in a consonant followed by -i are loanwords from non-Germanic languages (though some are very old loanwords), and most of them are pronounced with a final /i/ 'ee' sound. But nouns of the -us/-i pattern are funny, and a large number of English speakers pronunce the final vowel as the diphthong /ai/ 'eye'. (Some other exceptions are Greek letters like psi /sai/ and chi /kai/). So, for each of these words, in theory, we have four options: for the -gi words, /gi/, /gai/, /dʒi/ and /dʒai/, and for the -ci words, /ki/, /kai/, /si/ and /sai/. Strikingly, nearly all of these options have some support. Let's look at them in turn. Fungi: While 'fung-guy' /fʌŋɡai/ was by far the most popular choice with over 70% support, all four of the basic options were chosen by multiple individuals. A bit of a complexity is the fact that the 'g' is not just any old 'g', but an 'ng'. But of course, there is no /n/ sound in /fʌŋɡai/ although there is in 'fun guy' /fʌn ɡai/. For the two pronunciations with the 'soft' g, however, there is no /g/ either, so the velar nasal consonant /ŋ/ becomes /n/ while the /g/ becomes /dʒ/. Thus, fun-gee is pronounced /fʌndʒi/ rather than /fʌŋdʒi/ 'fung-gee'. I suspect this is why the two 'soft' g pronunciations are relatively unpopular: speakers are unwilling to make that much change to the word fungus when pluralizing it. Someday I will write a post on the awareness (or lack thereof) of the phoneme /ŋ/ among English speakers, but today is not that day. Magi: This word is most often encountered in churchy circles in reference to the Three Magi, bringer of the worst baby gifts ever, and in Dungeons and Dragons circles to 'ogre magi', a spell-wielding variety of ogre. I suspected, rightly, that I could safely omit the two 'hard g' pronunciations: in contrast to fungi, where a phonological constraint encouraged keeping the 'hard' g /g/, with magi, there is interference from the far more common word magic /mædʒɪk/ which of course has the 'soft' g. Curiously, though, I also intuited that almost everyone diphthongizes the final vowel to /ai/ - and not a lot of you complained, so I guess I must have been right in omitting that aspect of variability. No, in fact, with magi, the contrast is with the first vowel (the A), with the two variants being /ei/ and /æ/. Neither of these is good Latin, where the word would be pronounced /magi/ 'MAH-gee', but either one is potentially good English. The second choice, /æ/, is by far the more popular (68% to 23%), again, almost certainly under the influence of magic. An additional complexity is that in D&D (but not in church), ogre magi is the plural not of ogre magus but ogre mage, mage being an archaic and anglicized version of magus, but mage always takes the 'soft' g, never the hard one. Foci: This word, despised by many academics as gobbledygook, is also the source of much uncertainty in its pronunciation. As with fungi, the pronunciation /fokai/ 'fo-kye' with the 'hard' consonant and the diphthongized vowel is preferred by a majority, but not a large majority (56%). Absent the 'ng'-related constraint found in fungi, the 'soft c' pronunciations are relatively common, and even the etymologically correct Latin version /foki/ has some support. Quite a few of you, however, don't use the word at all, as opposed to the first two we've looked at. Abaci: Most of you probably don't have much cause to refer to abacus in the singular, much less the plural, but I have an academic research focus in premodern arithmetical instruments and am writing a paper on abaci, which I pronounce a-buh-kye, along with 63% of you, as opposed to only 8% who say a-buh-sye. Surprisingly many dictionaries don't even list a-buh-kye but only a-buh-sye and 'abacuses'. Over a quarter of you report that you don't use this word or don't know how you would pronounce it, which is unsurprising given its rarity. On the final question, a lot of you (over one-third) report using abacuses and a similar number use focuses instead of the standard plural. Far fewer of you say funguses and only a single person reported saying (or being willing to accept) maguses. Basically, the rarer the word, the more likely it is for the irregular form to be abandoned; this is a well-tested cross-linguistic regularity that explains why, for instance, common verbs like to be are almost always irregular and rare verbs like to cogitate are almost always regular. Magus is a bit of a funny one in this case, but the difference is that the plural form is actually commoner than the singular; I suspect that many users of magi don't ever have any reason to use the word magus. I'm sure I could go on, but at this point I think I will take fifteen minutes or so to rue the day I decided to do four words in one poll, even if there really was no other way it could have been done. Last 10 pronunciation polls | All previous polls | Pronunciation polls with analytical essays | Dialect surveyTags: language, wp
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This week's poll features some irregular plural noun forms ending in -gi and -ci. Poll #1056960 Fungi
Open to: All, results viewable to: AllWhich of the following best reflects how you pronounce the plural noun 'fungi'? Which of the following best reflects how you pronounce the plural noun 'magi'? Which of the following best reflects how you pronounce the plural noun 'foci'? Which of the following best reflects how you pronounce the plural noun 'abaci'? I sometimes / always use the following plural noun forms rather than the ones above: | | |
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94 (74.0%)![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small}