Everyone’s hanging crap on Sarah Palin for saying ‘nucular’.
Steve Benen at the Washington Monthly:
9:57: It’s a minor point, but did she say “nucular”?
The folks at Think Progress
9:50: Palin keep pronouncing “nuclear” as “nuculur” — perhaps because she doesn’t have her phonetic notes in front of her.
georgia10 at DKos:
And now we know that without the word spelled out phonetically for her, Palin loves the word “nukyular”, just like President Bush. The prospect of another eight years of that? Joy.
Much as I hate to defend the indefensible, as a linguist I have to step in.
What people don’t often realise is — once again — language changes in ways we’re not aware of. Sure, you may not like ‘nucular’ now. But in 100 years, if that’s what everyone says, that’ll be right.
Horrors! you scream. But this kind of thing has been going on for a long time. Take the word ‘iron’. I don’t know anyone that says it like it’s spelled, but the spelling suggests that its pronunciation has changed. ‘Iron’ has undergone the process of metathesis. Emphasis on the ‘ta’ (for now at least).
In Old English, ‘bird’ was ‘bryd’ and ‘horse’ was ‘hros’. You might look askance if someone wants to ‘ax’ you a question, but it turns out that ‘aks’ was once perfectly good English. It changed to ‘ask’, and it’s just changing back.
So the lesson for the day is: metathesis is a normal process of sound change in human languages, and not just something people do when they’re trying to say a word properly and not succeeding. So if you want to go after Palin, be my guest, but go after her for doing something idiotic. That isn’t too hard.
3 October 2008 at 11:17 pm
The Academic Standards Unit at my university sent round a matrix of ‘graduate skills’ which included ‘produce written work spelt correctly with appropriate use of grammar’. Of course one day it might well be ‘spelt’ instead of ‘spelled’ but right now it’s not so I got out a red pen, corrected it and sent it back to the unit hoping they would enjoy the irony. Spelt is an ancient form of wheat as it happens.
Pedantry rules!
4 October 2008 at 1:37 am
The point isn’t to be pedantic and say “nuclear” is the One True Way. The point is that Palin’s pronunciation is indicative of her ignorance of how well-educated people insist it should be pronounced.
Of course it may be the case that she’s aware of how the non-yokels say it but is pushing for some good Ole-fashioned metathesis. It’s a nice excuse; I could write my thesis in netspeek and claim “but i am evolving teh english, amirite?”.
Following the convention shows that you know the convention.
4 October 2008 at 1:51 am
Snowqueen, I’m not sure which university you go to, but I found this little nugget that suggests that “spelt” is more common in British English while “spelled” is more common in American English:
These are alternative forms of the past tense and past participle of the verb learn. Learnt is more common in British English, and learned in American English. There are a number of verbs of this type (burn, dream, kneel, lean, leap, spell, spill, spoil etc.). They are all irregular verbs, and this is a part of their irregularity.
http://www.askoxford.com/asktheexperts/faq/aboutspelling/learnt?view=uk
4 October 2008 at 11:22 pm
lol anonymous – can’t argue with the Oxford dictionary. I stand corrected! Though I’ve never seen it written that way although I have the other words. Creeping americanisation?
5 October 2008 at 2:28 am
I never heard ‘spelt’ in the USA, always ‘spelled’. I think it’s a UK feature.
People are conflating ‘correct’ with ‘standard’. Yes, there are dialects of English which are considered standard, for better or worse. People also have lots of attitudes and value judgments about people who speak ‘non-standard’ varieties of English: ignorant yokels, lazy, and so forth.
What people don’t always realise is that non-standard speakers are perfectly aware of the convention, but they use their variety as a mark of identity. And why shouldn’t they? There’s nothing about the so-called standard dialects that makes them intrinsically better than the others — they’re considered standard because of accidents of history. It’s quite an arbitrary distinction based on concerns of power.
And as I say in the post, if people complain about non-standard varieties of English, it means they’re unaware that speakers of the standard variety are engaging in the exact same processes as the other folks.
5 October 2008 at 4:29 am
@Daniel: re: standard vs correct, isn’t that exactly the point I was trying to make? I didn’t claim “nuclear” is correct (I said One True Way, since correct can lead to truisms depending on your definition). However, I don’t think any university physics lecturers would be caught dead saying “nyukular”. “Nuclear” is standard, according to the people in nuclear reactor control rooms.
The disagreement I have with you is that you seem to be against using the “non-standard” dialects as a way to differentiate between social classes. IMO, differentiating this way is great. If it sounds like a yokel, it is either a yokel or someone emulating the yokels. In Palin’s case it could be both, s/yokel/hockey mum/. You can then use this information in a non-arbitrary manner when you vote (i.e. do you want a yokel sympathiser in office). The only subjective judgement here is whether you like yokels. The linguistic inferences are valid.
Also I disagree “that non-standard speakers are perfectly aware of the convention“. When primary school children misspell words, they’re not asserting their cultural identity. They’re ignorant. If they don’t learn (from dropping out or whatever), they stay ignorant.
We’re not demonstrating that they are speaking/writing an inferior language, it shows that they haven’t learnt the standard form. Being able to learn the standard form is a reflection of their intelligence/knowledge.
So here’s the experiment: take a subject, and ask them to sythesize some message in both standard form and yokel form. I’d bet the better-educated subjects could go both ways. [I know ‘better’ here is a bit subjective, but you can just say university degree or something.]
5 October 2008 at 9:59 am
However, I don’t think any university physics lecturers would be caught dead saying “nyukular”. “Nuclear” is standard, according to the people in nuclear reactor control rooms.
How do you know?
When primary school children misspell words, they’re not asserting their cultural identity. They’re ignorant.
Ah, but I’m not talking about spelling, I’m talking about sound change. Spelling may be one area where you have a very good point. There are standardised spellings — or is that ‘standardized’? — and people do get it wrong sometimes.
But variation in sound is far more slippery. It changes from generation to generation, and we all do it unconsciously. Appreshiate, appresiate. If we say that one variant is a yokel variant, that’s just because we notice a difference (an arbitrary one, at that), look at the people doing it, and we label that sound pattern based on our feelings or ideas about those people. But if we know a bit more about language, we see that there’s no real non-arbitrary center to stand on. Language is sliding around constantly.
Everybody’s welcome to ideas about other people, of course, but when people try to ‘linguify’ them, it doesn’t really work.
Re: your experiment. I think you’ll find that people who speak the non-standard variant are much better at switching to the standard than vice versa. Ask college-educated white Americans to try speaking AAVE. Then get lower-educated black Americans to try standard. They’ll do it better, guaranteed. They’ve heard it all their lives on TV.
5 October 2008 at 11:28 am
There is nothing inherently better or worse about different ways of pronouncing things. As Daniel said, it’s natural dialect variation. People have their own ‘rules’ of language in their brains; these have little or nothing to do with prescriptive rules we all learn in school.
That being said, there is a standard. There are prescriptive rules. It’s important to know them, and the consequences of (not) following them. However, some bits of language are more conscious than others. Some bits are harder to change.
Yes, lack of knowledge of the standard form of a language demonstrates a failure to learn it, for whatever reasons. Failure to use that standard form doesn’t; it can signal all sorts of things.
In Palin’s case, I think the fact that she’s using prompts means that she’s aware of the standard and is attempting to emulate it. Which means she is both educated enough to know it, and savvy enough to know that she needs to be using it. She’s just making the transition to actually using it.
I find it fascinating that, not only is she judged for what her ‘natural’ form is (attitudes about where she comes from, what educational, political or socio-economic background it’s seen to demonstrate); she’s also judged for trying to change it.
The fact that she comes from some sort of background that makes her pronunciation nonstandard is all it takes. She needs a guide to help her fix it, and she’s ridiculed for that. She’s trying to follow social conventions, standards, and pedantic rules; but she’s not allowed to change in a way that obfuscates her background.
6 October 2008 at 2:23 am
We need to make sure a big fake Red Button on the Oval Office desk says “Lawnch Nucular Weppins”, keep the real button hidden.
As far as I remember, ‘Nucular’ is a State Department thing since the Eisenhower days, apparently he pronounced it that way and it stuck.Cheney says nucular as well. Palin is not above saying something wrong to appear more folksy.
They way she pronounces a word doesn’t scare me, they way she says nothing of substance does. I reserve the right to VERY prescriptive about that.
6 October 2008 at 3:56 am
How do you know?
Small sample size, but you can wander into the physics department if you don’t believe me about the lecturers. I’ll retract the rest because it wasn’t an appeal to authority, just a reference point.
But variation in sound is far more slippery.
Misspellings and mispronunciations are not independent. Nevertheless, I’ll concede that a lot of what I said is better supported by written rather than spoken language.
Everybody’s welcome to ideas about other people, of course, but when people try to ‘linguify’ them, it doesn’t really work.
I think linguists get upset when their work is used for Evil, whether or not logical fallacies are commited.
[…] They’ve heard it all their lives on TV.
Okay, the yokel-Turing test gets more sucky the more I look at it. However, here are some less inflammatory and more interesting observations.
There are two dimensions; the subject’s exposure to each dialect (which I’d lumped in education), and the complexity (relative to some base dialect) and kurtosis of the dialect. I’m using the 4th moment instead of the 2nd since I suspect it is more indicative of what people would find an acceptable production. Some examples, relative to “common” (don’t bite) English:
– Something highly standardised leptokurtic, complex enough to fill a book
– lolcat: highly leptokurtic, simple enough to be described in a page
– broad Australian: platykurtic, complex enough for a few pages
– eb^H^HAAVE: leptokurtic, quite complex (I’d guess from looking at it)
The experiment should show that the difficulty of emulation is proportional to the leptokurtosis and relative complexity; providing you control for cross-exposure and find a suitable base dialect. The qualification makes the experiment infeasible.
@Jessica: I totally agree.
6 October 2008 at 11:05 am
@ dean
umm… I’d like to see your rationale for your complexity classification. For example, you could cite a linguistic grammar of Broad Australian English that is only a few pages. Heck, if you can find the phonology of any language/dialect reasonably described in less than 30 pages I’d be impressed.
There’s not really much variation, if any at all, in the levels of complexity in languages. It’s just a matter of where the complexity is.
Furthermore, coming from a non-standard English background, I take it as a very very bad thing that people are ridiculed as Palin is (I mean, linguistically). It’s great for maintaining the status quo, but isn’t that what liberals are supposed to be fighting against? Just wanted to make sure I got that opinion across 🙂
7 October 2008 at 5:04 am
Jessica beat me to it.
There are no two human languages that you can look at and say “A has a more complex grammar than B”.
Counter-intuitive, but true.
7 October 2008 at 8:26 am
I’ll take Daniel’s word that the overall complexity of “human languages” is approximately the same. It’s actually what I’d intuitively expect: you can see a mechanism via CLT and universals in human physiology and behaviour.
However, it’s way too easy to create a counter-example: take any language L, change it slightly to make a more complex L’, then start using L’ prescriptively among your clique.
Nevertheless, this wasn’t what I was asserting. The measure was:
complexity (relative to some base dialect)
i.e. this is a distance, perhaps measured by the rewrite rules and restrictions required to get from one grammar to the other.
Heck, if you can find the phonology of any language/dialect reasonably described in less than 30 pages I’d be impressed.
Again, given that we’re talking about a relative measure, easy to do. Take a language L, and replace a single lexeme x with y. I’ve described the change in a single sentence, QED.
The wikipedia page lists some rewrite rules for AAVE relative to common English, and it looks less than 30 pages (my label was ‘quite complex’). I accept this isn’t comphrehensive, but I’d guess it characterises a significant interval in the distribution. Macquarie had a characterisation of Broad Australian that was journal-article sized, but I’ve got no citation.
18 October 2008 at 10:46 am
@ Dean
Fair call about my misunderstanding of your post. I still have some disagreements, but I appreciate the clarification.
AAVE and Australian phonology: Lisa Green’s (2002) chapter on phonology of AAVE, a ‘descriptive summary’, is around 30 pages. And it’s just that – a summary, based on the limited knowledge of the subject when she wrote it. As for phonology of Australian English: I’m sure my friend who is doing her masters thesis on the phonology of Perth English (and attitudes about it) will be glad to hear it’ll be a brief write-up. In truth, it, like AAVE, is another topic that not all that much is known about, so write-ups are bound to not be huge. Yet.
I’ll definitely give on the main premise of your argument: some languages are closer to each other than others, and are therefore easier to learn. But phonology, being largely unconscious, is notoriously difficult to master. Every fluent non-native speaker you know with a foreign accent is an example of this.
From my own experience, I’d add the argument that sounds that are close, but not quite identical, to your native sound system are by far the hardest to master. Variations that lie within your own sound system are even harder. I can pronounce languages with bizarre (to us) sounds without too much trouble, but I can’t affect any sort of accent in English to save my life (not that it’s ever come to that), and the foreign sounds that are pains to my bodyparts are the ‘n’s and ‘r’s that aren’t *quite* the same as what I naturally pronounce. That’s not based on research, though, and there is certainly literature available on the topic.