Well the starfish post was supposed to have been the last post. But alas! It was not meant to be my swansong.. Or err, swanpost..

Instead ladies and gents, it seems that there is some sort of conspiracy out there to annoy me with some form of new pronunciation innovation. Something boomz, y'know.

So there I was in class today, an EL class anyway. Minding my own business when the professor/tutor/teaching assistant* (I will not reveal what his/her post is) pronounced the second vowel in matron and apron as /ɒ/, instead of a schwa. So yes, the second syllables of matron and apron were pronounced in the same way the third vowel of Megatron is pronounced.
Of course, the class was very excited about this and you could hear murmurs all around. Said professor/tutor/teaching assistant* seemed oblivious.. Or was s/he? Hm.

I turned to my friend, who also happened to be the one I had a talk about the vays/vas distinction (Lazy lah to copy-paste the IPA symbols :D), seated beside me. So I asked her what was up with the homo"tron"phone in apron and matron. She shrugged. I frowned.

I checked dictionary.com for a pronunciation check (for the last time!) and yes! It was supposed to be a schwa for both words. Why did s/he pronounce it that way?!

It's like these people know I'm keeping a blog on lexical observations, and they're trying to get themselves on this blog.. Or maybe it's just me :D





*Delete accordingly

I admit that this might not be very lexical but I thought we could use a smile once in a while.

Remember my post about Manhattan Fish Market? I was on their website and checking the "fishy facts" section, the part where they tell you general information about fish that you never need to know in real life :D

Here's a screen grab from the site, it's small and pixel-y here but if you click on the picture, the bigger picture will look much better.


















For everyone's benefit, what the last line said was that "A starfish doesn't have a brain". And my lexical priming immediately made me think of this:




















HAHAHAHA! He's cute, and hilarious sometimes, but I wouldn't want him working on my house anytime soon :)

I was at my cousin's place last week and we somehow got into the topic of pronuncations, or specifically, mis-pronunciations. So my cousin, who was 16, told me that his English teacher should be fired. He said that his teacher taught him that "wagon" should be pronounced as /weIg@n/.

SAY WHAT?!?!

As a budding linguist, I've always repeatedly told myself that I should not judge someone by the way s/he pronounces words (pasir ris low not included). But when I heard about how his teacher pronounced wagon I felt like slapping her, and slapping myself too. (I guess I was that upset)

I can't offer an explanation as to the teacher's (warped) pronunciation, except that she might have been high on something that day :s

And the online dictionaries I checked also confirmed that there was only one pronunciation of wagon, which wasn't the one that she said.

Perhaps she thought the "wa" in "wagon" was supposed to be pronounced the same way as the Singaporeans' way of saying the "we" in "wedges"?

I guess this is similar to when Prof encountered the guy who said "dah-ta", though I still cannot in the life of me figure out how in the world she could have pronounced it as /weIg@n/.


They let anybody in these days.

I was out with my friend last Friday. We were at Daiso as she wanted to look for a vase (can you see where this post is going? :D). My friend is a fellow EL major (just fyi) and she said to me, "I'm going to go look at the /vɑz/."

It immediately reminded me of Emmalyn' s post about the /vɑz/-/veɪs/ distinction.

So because we're linguists-in-training, I decided that I could talk to her about it without being judged.

Me: Eh actually I pronounce it as /veɪs/.

Friend: Huh? Why?

Me: I don't know. I think it has something to do with the British-American distinction.

Friend: But that's so weird, I've never heard anyone use /veɪs/ before.

Me: Ya, I think I watch too much American TV.

Friend: *laughs*


So I went to Merriam Webster later at night (dictionary.com has failed me yet again!), and found that indeed, /vɑz/ is the British pronunciation, whereas /veɪs/ is the American one. (For a guide to the AHD transcriptions, check out yahoo dictionary's pronunciation key here).


I've asked around and it seems that most of my peers use /vɑz/ more, which I attribute to our British-based education system. I'm sure that long ago, when I was still in secondary school/JC, I would have said /vɑz/. But I guess my American TV influences are too strong (ie: I watch too much TV :s) after I left and entered uni.


On a related note, my sister pronounces "dance" as /dans/, instead of /dAns/. I thought it was pretty strange! Haha.



And then I realise that I pronounce words like "dance" and "can't" the Brit way, but when I sing along to songs, I pronounce it the American way. Even British singers alter their pronunciations to the American pronunciations in songs. Compare the way Craig David speaks and sings for example!

Which reminds me of this reading I, urm, read for a module last year. It talked about how British singers in the 60s alter their pronunciations in songs so as to sound more American and break into the market. The American music scene was booming back then, while the British one wasn't as established.

So while I admit that I am Americanised in some ways, such as saying /veɪs/, at least I'm not so Americanised as to say /dans/ or /cant/ :D

Y'all have a good day now, y'hear?

BAD JOKE ALERT!!

I thought that for this post, I'd share a story of word play and an instance of a plain bad joke :D

So my best friend and I went to The Manhattan Fish Market (it's now halal muslim people!! :D) after our Bugis Street adventure and we noticed that the waiters/waitresses always shouted "Welcome!" whenever a customer walked in.

(Warning. Bad joke ahead. Those allergic to lame jokes, STOP NOW.)





So anyway, they kept shouting and it got irritating after a while, especially since they kept echoing each other. So then I leaned forward to my friend across the table and said, "Why do they keep shouting? Do they think this is some kind of fish market or something?"


***


Rolled your eyes? :D

So there I was feeling pretty pleased with myself for having come up with such a fantastic instance of word play. And I also thought about how learners of English might not get the pun as they would not have known that the term "fish market" is used to describe a noisy place.

I was all gung-ho and ready to prove my theory. But alas! None of the dictionaries on the course page had the correct definition for "fish market"! Even my trusted dictionary.com has let me down! Oh, woe is me..

So I turned to google and searched for the phrase "as noisy as a fish market", and STILL no such term or definition/examples of the term came up.

But there was one that defined fish market in the way that I know, and it wasn't even a dictionary.

KalaRanga Archives: Fish Market Scene:
On the Konkan coast and elsewhere, a fish market is synonym with noisy, free for all
situations. A common usage is teacher to students making noise - "Do you think this is a fish market ?"

The website seems to be from India. Hmm so does this mean that the phrase "as noisy as a fish market" is more Asian than Western? And specifically, is it just found in South Asian contexts, as opposed to the whole of Asia?

Something fishy is brewing my friends! You have the power to put me out of my misery and let me know if you've heard of this phrase before.

And going back to the anecdote that started it all, I know- bad joke. I warned you :p

I was at Bugis street the other day on a shopping (ie: bargain hunting) trip with a friend. We passed by the food stalls on level one, and one stall's sign caught my eye.

I didn't take a picture, because I didn't want to court trouble (It's not exactly GEM service over there :s) but the sign advertised for "roti bun".

?!?!?!?!

For those of us who speak Malay and/or Tamil, that's a classic case of repeating words. Because in both languages, "roti" simply means "bread".

So in other words, said stall was advertising "bread bun". Wow.

Anyhoo, it's quite weird isn't it! Bun is already a form of bread, I mean they are both made of the same main ingredient, that is flour.

So once again, I went to dictionary.com (I'm so predictable :D) to test my hunches.

bread
-noun
1. a kind of food made of flour or meal that has been mixed with milk or water, made into a dough or batter, with or without yeast or other leavening agent, and baked.

bun
-noun
1. any of a wide variety of variously shaped bread rolls, usually leavened and slightly sweetened or plain, sometimes containing spices, dried currants, etc.


Ahhh so there is some variation in the meanings of both words. Nevertheless, "roti bun" or "bread bun" is akin to saying "vegetable salad" or "egg omelette", isn't it? As in, is there any other way to make them? :s

I considered going up to the uncle and saying:

Ok so my earlier promise of a spammage of posts is, to put it in informal speak, failz. It was getting late and the sandman was calling (I'm getting old). So let me continue my posts today.

A few days back, I came across the word "clerk", and I immediately wondered whether it was pronounced as "klɜrk" or "klɑrk" (I've learnt how to cheat and put the symbols in blog posts! :D). I've been debating with my friends (and myself) as to which is the accepted pronunciation for a few years now. I would pronounce it as "klɜrk" while my friends would pronounce it as "klɑrk". And none of us could come up with the answer to put an end to the debate once and for all.

Thus I have decided today to put an end to the debate once and for all.

I turned to my good ol' friend, dictionary.com, for advice. In the entry, the IPA symbols section had this:
/klɜrk; Brit. klɑrk/

!!!

I've been Americanised! Haha. As opposed to my friends who have remained under the influence of the British schooling system, American TV has managed to override my British influences and made me accept the American pronunciation.

Huhu.

I wonder if the same reasoning applies for the hash brown debate in the previous post :D

I realise that I have not been updating and fulfilling the minimum requirement of two posts per week, but fear not fellow coursemates! I have been keeping track of my lexical observations and jotting them down. And thus begins the spammage of posts in the next hour :D

Danny's post on Carrie Underwood's song "Unapologise" reminded me of a song that Toni Braxton released really long ago. It's called "Unbreak my heart" and was released in 1996 (ancient in the music world). A youtube link of her music video is here. I'd like to apologise for the cheesy opening haha. But that's beyond my control :)

Anyway as Danny mentioned in his post, the song title in Carrie's case was a very interesting use of the prefix "un-". Similarly, Toni Braxton uses "un-" in her song to tell her guy she's in pain and thus says "unbreak my heart" to the guy as an imperative.

There's also a line in the song that goes "uncry these tears".

As pretty knowledgeable speakers of English, we know exactly what Toni was trying to express when she says "unbreak my heart" and "uncry these tears". She wants to undo her broken heart and the tears cried. But of course, that's impossible right? I mean, in the pragmatics sense. It's a perfectly grammatical sentence, and yet it makes no real-world sense.

It's like the sentence "his dog accused me of stealing its food and my rock ran away". So how do unbreak a heart? Mend, yes, but unbreak? Or how do you uncry the tears shed? (This sounds very philosophical!)

And to throw in a concept that we just learnt in class, based on Melissa's presentation, the presupposition in the song is that her heart had been broken :D Haha

I was the National Museum of Singapore for the Egyptian exhibition and had some time to spare after that, so I went to the Bag exhibition upstairs, which featured paper and plastic bags in Singapore throughout the years.

And of course, even while I was there to do a project on another module, I was still looking out for lexical observations for this module (Prof, are you reading this? ;D )

And I found this bag that had me raising an eyebrow.


























No, I'm not talking about their fashion :p I was referring to this:

Dedicated to Danny (^.^)V

Whahahahahaha

I'm sure we're all familiar with the word "kindly" in our everyday use. I think we can safely say that "kindly" is used as a politeness strategy. So if I wanted a friend to help me retrieve something, I'd say "Could you kindly help me take my shoes?"

But did you know that in certain contexts, "kindly" is used more for sarcasms? In this forum thread that I found, "kindly" is usually used in sarcastic remarks. Also, as said by one of the users, the word is used "in the sense there is an implication that the person... is doing something wrong", ie:
Kindly refrain from talking during lecture
Kindly remove your feet from the table

So their advice is that if you want to signal politeness, you should use "could you" or "please" instead.

Nur Rashidah

This blog is a compulsory component of a Linguistics module I'm taking. I, along with my other coursemates, have to note down our observations on the English Language twice weekly.

I'll try to make the anecdotes as entertaining and personal as possible, but having said that I must stress that this is in no way a personal blog whatsoever :)

Do leave a comment to say hi, criticise constructively or just to share what's up :)

Amelia Teng
Amelia Leong (Mia)
Daniel #1
Daniel #2 (Danny)
Emmalyn
Heon
Hui Min
Jeanette
Jia Jie
Melissa
Ying Qi
Zuhara

January 2010

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March 2010

Honesty is the best policy! Leave the credits alone!
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