Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2017 December 5

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December 5

the meaning of tortoise's strategy

Would you please let me know the meaning of 'tortoise's strategy' in the following passage.

A number of my new colleagues had built reputations for themselves before entering the Commons, and were widely expected to gain early promotion. Others chose the tortoise's strategy, and set out painstakingly to learn the way Parliament worked.---John Major, The Autobiography, p.67.

2400:4136:957E:8C00:24EE:9D10:9A25:357F (talk) 02:40, 5 December 2017 (UTC)dengen

See The Tortoise and the Hare. --Trovatore (talk) 03:17, 5 December 2017 (UTC)

Often quoted as "Slow and steady wins the race"... AnonMoos (talk) 06:46, 5 December 2017 (UTC)

Glottal stops in Aussie English (continued)

Continuing on from November 27#Glottal stops in Aussie English, it seems others share my surprise on this point.

See here (ABC News, 5 December 2017): My pet pronunciation peeve is the mispronunciation of the word "the" in front of a word beginning with a vowel. Many people, and just about all newsreaders, pronounce it as a neutral "thuh" instead of sounding it out as "thee", as in "tea". It's thee apple, not thuh apple. This is precisely the issue I raised on 27 November.

As I said before, this seems to be a relatively recent change, and I'd love to track down what's behind it. -- Jack of Oz ^{[pleasantries]} 08:52, 5 December 2017 (UTC)

Beyond linguistic drift and Phonological change? Language evolution is not mechanistic, really, and changes can not be linked to purpose. Purpose implies either intelligent directing or repeatable causation, and linguistic change is neither. Many linguistic changes just happen; they are often caused by Language contact; we know this in general because more isolated languages are more conservative (i.e. without contact between different bodies of speakers, languages tend to change less). --Jayron32 13:13, 5 December 2017 (UTC)

Smoking gun source for you, Jack: this paper states " There may be a recent change in progress towards repressing /r/ sandhi as part of a more generalised development affecting the liaison rules that have typically been used for hiatus-breaking of two separate adjacent vowels. Such repression of sandhi involves the substitution of a glottal stop for previously common liaison elements." (bold mine) It then gives IPA transcriptions of examples EXACTLY like the ones you question about. So yes, this IS a noted phenomenon in the literature. The same article notes that the use of the glottal stop is not accepted in Standard Australian English as yet, but it IS a real change that is in the process of happening. --Jayron32 17:48, 5 December 2017 (UTC)

I must write to my member of parliament to have this awful development arrested before it does incalculable damage to the fabric of our society. Thanks for the excellent confirmatory link, Jayron. -- Jack of Oz ^{[pleasantries]} 21:47, 5 December 2017 (UTC)

According to the classic "Dates in the Month of May that Are of Interest to Linguists", on "May 7, 1966. r-less pronunciation is observed in eight kindergarten pupils in Secaucus, N.J. The governor of New Jersey stations national guardsmen along the banks of the Hudson." -- AnonMoos (talk) 04:30, 6 December 2017 (UTC)

The paper does not remark on this, but it appears that a glide is more likely if the second vowel is unstressed - it is very difficult to insert a glottal stop between "the" and "event", for example. 92.8.221.62 (talk) 16:59, 6 December 2017 (UTC)

That's a excellent point. :) And that brings me to a related development: people who always use the "a" form of the indefinite article, never choosing "an" before a vowel-starting word. This preference for ugly sounds is bewildering. -- Jack of Oz ^{[pleasantries]} 20:20, 8 December 2017 (UTC)

It's my recollection, though I'm not sure where to find a ref, that words in English that start with a stressed vowel actually start with a glottal stop, which is a consonant. We just don't write it down.

So while you might not use a glottal stop in Go to the oven and make me some ever-lovin', you probably do use it in Oven cleaning is the most enjoyable pastime known to man.

It seems to me that it's the removal of the glottal stop after "the" that is the phenomenon that needs explanation. --Trovatore (talk) 20:28, 8 December 2017 (UTC)

I don't really understand this, Trovatore. Not sure which of the "the"s you're referring to, but I see no case for a glottal stop after either of them. -- Jack of Oz ^{[pleasantries]} 20:37, 8 December 2017 (UTC)

In the second sentence, I'm not talking about "the", but about "Oven" at the start of the sentence. --Trovatore (talk) 20:40, 8 December 2017 (UTC)

Again, I'm floundering here. How do we get any kind of stop, glottal or otherwise, at the very start of a sentence? The stop surely occurs after the last word of the preceding sentence. Which is not the same place. No? -- Jack of Oz ^{[pleasantries]} 20:43, 8 December 2017 (UTC)

Well, [t] is a stop, and I don't think you have any problem using that at the start of a sentence. --Trovatore (talk) 20:46, 8 December 2017 (UTC)

But "Oven" doesn't include a [t]. -- Jack of Oz ^{[pleasantries]} 20:57, 8 December 2017 (UTC)

No, but [t] is a stop, just like [ʔ] is a stop.

What I'm saying is, when you think you're starting a sentence (out of the blue, not connected to a previous sentence) with a vowel, you're actually starting it with a [ʔ]. That is, you start with your glottis closed, and explode the vowel sound out of that. This is so automatic in English that it's hard to notice, because it's not easy to imagine doing it differently. But it is possible to do it differently, and I think (but am not sure) that some languages do. --Trovatore (talk) 21:59, 8 December 2017 (UTC)

German and Arabic do - in Arabic it's a separate letter and can appear anywhere. In German there should be a glottal stop before a vowel at the beginning of a word (so, "der Adler" for example has one before the A...as far as I remember from the pretty basic German I learned). Adam Bishop (talk) 01:59, 9 December 2017 (UTC)

By "differently" I meant I think there are languages where you can pronounce a vowel as the first phoneme after silence, without using a glottal stop. But in English, you really can't. It feels really weird in your throat even to try. --Trovatore (talk) 02:09, 9 December 2017 (UTC)

Thanks for all that - I think. Anyway, this had diverged far from the topic. The common spoken currency has always been "theeyoven", "theeyapple", but some people are now choosing to say "thuh oven", "thuh apple". People don't just suddenly introduce discontinuities into the flow of their speech without a very good reason. The trend is very much in the smoothing, gliding direction. -- Jack of Oz ^{[pleasantries]} 17:27, 11 December 2017 (UTC)

@JackofOz: phrase or sentence initial glottal stop in English is mandatory in the colloquial uh-oh ("oops" or "I see trouble") and in unh-unh ("nope"). Without the glottal stops you'd get a mush of vague vowels. μηδείς (talk) 17:29, 11 December 2017 (UTC)

Thanks, but I don't see how this is relevant to my question. The glottal stop in "the apple" is clearly not sentence-initial. -- Jack of Oz ^{[pleasantries]} 18:29, 11 December 2017 (UTC)

I guess the point I was making is, it's at least arguable that there's no such thing in English as a word that starts with a vowel. The ones we think start with vowels, actually start with glottal stops. Then the thing that needs to be explained is not why a glottal stop is sometimes interposed, but why it's sometimes dropped.

In any case, as I say, I don't think these glottal stops after "the" are anything new in American English; they've been around a long time. Whether they're a novelty in Oz, you'd know better than I. --Trovatore (talk) 19:02, 11 December 2017 (UTC)

My mention of sentence/phrase initial glottal stops (which are contrastive, since without them uh-oh becomes the skeptical "...ooh" and unh-unh becomes the "enh" of disgust) was in direct response to your statement above: "Again, I'm floundering here. How do we get any kind of stop, glottal or otherwise, at the very start of a sentence?" [-JoO] μηδείς (talk) 19:18, 11 December 2017 (UTC)

Just to be clear, I am NOT saying that glottal stops are unknown in Australian English. Far from it. But in the specific instances of (a) the definite article "the" followed by a word that starts with a stressed vowel, and (b) the choice of the indefinite article form "a" rather than "an", where preceding a word that starts with a vowel, we are now getting glottal stops in those places where glottal stops were completely unknown until quite recently. -- Jack of Oz ^{[pleasantries]} 21:34, 11 December 2017 (UTC)

Sauchiehall Street

What does the "Sauchiehall" in Sauchiehall Street mean? DuncanHill (talk) 22:22, 5 December 2017 (UTC)

Is there something wrong with the explanation in Sauchiehall Street#Name, Duncan? --ColinFine (talk) 22:40, 5 December 2017 (UTC)

(EC) From the article you linked Sauchiehall Street#Name: from Scots sauchie hauch; sauchie meaning "abounding in willows" and hauchmeaning "a low-lying meadow by the side of a river". This likewise says "willow meadow".--William Thweatt ^TalkContribs 22:47, 5 December 2017 (UTC)

Clearly Colin, there is something wrong with the explanation, as if there wasn't I would have seen it! Thank you both, DuncanHill (talk) 23:03, 5 December 2017 (UTC)

Note that willows belong to the genus Salix See wikt:salix#Latin: "From Proto-Indo-European *saləḱ-, *salək- ‎(“willow”‎); Cognate with Middle Irish sail, Welsh helygen, Breton halegen ‎(“willow”‎), Cornish helyk, Old English sealh, English sallow." μηδείς (talk) 02:38, 6 December 2017 (UTC)

Yes, see sallow which redirects to willow, although in the UK it is the common name for Salix caprea or other broad-leaved willows. [1] Alansplodge (talk) 08:52, 7 December 2017 (UTC)

In American English sallow is usually only used in higher registers to refer to a yellowish skin color, due to illness in caucasians or a not very complimentary term for people with a different complexion from whites based on ethnicity. Of course deciduous willows have pretty yellow leaves in the fall, not a sickly color or a human skin color at all. μηδείς (talk) 16:11, 7 December 2017 (UTC)

I know the word only in that sense in the UK, Medeis. I don't doubt that the meaninmg Alansplodge mentions is found, but I've never heard it (and I have a particular interest in trees). --ColinFine (talk) 19:51, 7 December 2017 (UTC)

The evidence of the shameless pussy willow

So, as an Ugly American, can I take it that that means either @ColinFine: or @Alansplodge: roots for Manchester United, but not the both o' yiz? I find it quite interesting that Scots English retains this term, and it shows how utterly vital the Anglic languages are to the reconstruction of proto-Germanic and PIE. Given that *saləḱ- does not fit the canonical C(R)e(R)C- root form of PIE, It is curious whether this is not an Old European word like dog and carrock. μηδείς (talk) 02:02, 8 December 2017 (UTC)

Erm no, Leyton Orient actually. Although salix caprea is quite a common hedgerow tree here in the southeast of England, the everyday term here is "pussy willow" as the catkins at springtime resemble the tip of a cat's tail. However, when teaching tree identification to Scouts, the term "pussy" has less salubrious connotations and is best avoided when talking to teenaged boys, so "sallow" it is. The term "goat willow" is also in the books but I've never heard anybody use it, it may be a regional thing. My Field Guide to the Trees of Britain and Northern Europe by Alan Mitchell does not make the "great sallow" and "common sallow" (salix cinerea) distinction quoted in the link I originally posted, but I'd be hard pushed to distinguish the two anyway. Alansplodge (talk) 09:10, 8 December 2017 (UTC)

I had to read Medeis' comment three times before I even understood what she was trying to say (misled by "roots" in a discussion about trees), and even now that I've parsed it, I've no idea what she's trying to say. I'm not interested in football. --ColinFine (talk) 14:37, 8 December 2017 (UTC)

Similarly somewhat confused, but as far as I can tell, the use of "sallow" to describe a tree species is not any more common in Scotland than in England - which seems to be not very much. Alansplodge (talk) 19:42, 8 December 2017 (UTC)

Well, The Ugly American is a classic of English literature, and I have witnessed it myself. Americans are loud and provincial and think foreign languages are to be spoken slowly, loudly, with a lot of gesturing, and vowels appended to the end of English words, as in "POR FAVOR, EL TEEVEEO NO WORKO". (Basil Fawlty was American on both sides.) I was kidding that Colin and Alan must live in two different cities, not both being intimate with the term Sallow. Since the only options are London and Manchester, the soccer alignment follows naturally in an American's mind. And we call it pussy willow without shame, although the term is a bit salicious. μηδείς (talk) 20:37, 8 December 2017 (UTC)

Surely "pussy" is now well accepted, having an unimpeachable presidential imprimatur. -- Jack of Oz ^{[pleasantries]} 20:40, 8 December 2017 (UTC)

One does not use the term unimpeachable P in polite company. μηδείς (talk) 01:02, 9 December 2017 (UTC)