28487
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Language Log
Mormon Tabernacle Choir vowel variations
I departed a total of about 260 miles from my Route 30 / Lincoln Highway running route to come down to Salt Lake City for a few perduring reasons.
1. From the time I was a little boy, I have always wanted to float in the Great Salt Lake.
2. From the time I was in junior high school, I've always wanted to hear the Mormon Tabernacle Choir in person.
3. From the time I was in high school, I have always wanted to visit the world's greatest collection of genealogical records, created at great expense and effort by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints,
Last night I was privileged to hear the MTC — all 360 members, plus 110 members of the orchestra — during their Thursday evening practice session. Of course, the director paid a lot of attention to emphasis, volume, tonal quality, pronunciation, breathing, and so forth, but what amazed me most of all was the amount of time, attention, and care he devoted to variations in the quality of vowels.
At first I was going to refer to this phenomenon as vowel gradation, but then I realized that expression has been coopted for ablaut and umlaut. So I'm referring to it as vowel variation. What was particularly stunning was the fact that the quality of the vowels he demonstrated was intimately related to the melodic contours being performed. The director paid exceedingly close attention to this linkage, and the 360 members of the choir responded immediately and exactingly.
I don't think that any notation system (IPA or other) could record on a two dimensional surface the fine gradations / variations of the director's demonstrations. It had to be done orally and even visually by perception of the director's vocal apparatus (mouth, throat, lips, and — to an extent — tongue): high, low, front, back, middle, rounded, closed, and so forth, including glissandos from one to the other. It is this dedication to the precise analysis of tone production that accounts for the smooth, full, rich sound of the MTC. Although there were 360 voices, the result was that of an intimate ensemble.
The acoustics of the tabernacle (built 1863-1867) are perfect, so I could hear every detail, though I was sitting at the back of the hall in the balcony. One of the demonstrations of the superb acoustics of the MT is that someone can tear a piece of paper at the front of the hall and you can hear it clearly from any spot in the auditorium.
Selected readings
* "Vowel chart body art" (12/26/09)
* "Tabernacle Choir" (Wikipedia)
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Language Log
Is there evidence of senility in Trump's speech?
Sarah Posner on Bluesky, linking to a kamalahq tweet and a kamalahq Instagram post:
In the thread below: a completely rambling, unhinged, incomprehensible quote from Trump at his Flint town hall with Sarah Huckabee Sanders that the Harris campaign distributed, then news headlines about same event.
Where is all the coverage that Trump is old and can't speak a coherent sentence?
I've been defending Donald Trump against similar accusations since my exchange with Geoff Pullum in 2015 — "Trump's aphasia" vs. "Trump's eloquence". Has anything changed?
The answer, I think, is "maybe, but not very much". We'll begin with the 9/17/2024 Flint passage, and then compare the 7/21/2015 passage.
The first point is that the cited passage from the recent Flint town hall is not "incomprehensible". Here's the prompt from Sarah Huckabee Sanders:
Your browser does not support the audio element.
And Mr. President, we don't mind that you give long answers, because you actually have something to say, because you actually got something done when you were president.
And Trump's response (I've edited the kamalahq transcript for accuracy, also including a bit more around the edges, with changes in blue vs. red for the original…):
Your browser does not support the audio element.
You know, it's a very interesting- cause she-
she said- I ((could)) said-
I don't think I've ever said this before.
So we do these rallies. They're massive rallies.
Everybody loves– everybody stays till the end by the way.
You know,
when she said that,
"well, your rallies people leave"
Honestly, nobody does.
And if I saw them leaving, I'd say "and ladies and gentlemen make America great again" and I'd get the hell out, ok?
Because I don't want people leaving.
But I– I do have to ((say)) so–
I give these long sometimes very complex sentences and paragraphs
But they all come together. I do it a lot. I do it with
uh… raising cane, that story; I do it with the uh
story on the catapults on the aircraft carriers, I do it with a lot of different stories.
When I mentioned Doctor Hannibal Lecter
I'm using that as an example of people that are coming in, from Silence of the Lambs.
I use it, they say
it's terrible.
So they say–
so I'll give this long complex area,
for instance that-
I talked about a lot of different territory–
the bottom line is I said the most important thing.
We're going to bring more plants into your state, and this country
to make automobiles. We're going to be bigger than before.
But the fake news
says-
There's a lot of them back there, if-
You know, for a town hall, there's a lot of peo–
but the fake news likes to say,
the fake((s)) news likes to say "oh,
he was rambling." No, no, that's not rambling.
That's genius. When you can connect the dots.
((You gotta connect-))
Now,
now,
Sarah,
if you couldn't connect the dots, you got a problem.
But every dot was connected and many stories were told in that little paragraph.
But there is something-
but they say that-
…and onward, through more complaining about not getting credit for his alleged rally sizes and crowd enthusiasm.
Incomprehensible? I don't think so — Trump is clearly complaining about various things that Harris poked fun at during the 9/10/2024 debate.
There are plenty of false starts, parentheticals, and associative jumps. But the focus on reacting to Harris's jibes is consistent and plain.
Compare the 2015 passage that Geoff Pullum reacted to. Here's the audio, followed by the (not very accurate) transcript that Geoff took from Slate magazine:
Your browser does not support the audio element.
Look, having nuclear—my uncle was a great professor and scientist and engineer, Dr. John Trump at MIT; good genes, very good genes, OK, very smart, the Wharton Sch[...]
Word of the Day
Word of the Day: watershed
This word has appeared in 168 articles on NYTimes.com in the past year. Can you use it in a sentence?
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Phrasal Verb of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub
seal off
to stop people from going into an area or a building, often because it isn't safe
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Language Log
Cultural literacy at The Guardian
There has been an enormous turbulence over the simultaneous explosion of Hezbollah pagers (some call them walkie-talkies) at 3:30 PM on September 17, 2024, involving as it does actors in regions as far flung as the Middle East, Europe, and East Asia. No one could be closer to the center of the turmoil than the gentleman in the middle of the doorway in this photograph:
http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/~bgzimmer/goldapollo.jpg
He is Hsu Ching-kuang (Xǔ Qīngguāng 許清光), founder and chief executive of Taiwan tech company Gold Apollo, which is alleged to have made the offending pagers, although Hsu denies it.
The photograph comes from this article:
"‘This is very embarrassing’: Middle East crisis takes a detour to an office park in Taiwan: Media spotlight shifted to Taiwan tech company Gold Apollo which has denied supplying the pagers that exploded across the Hezbollah network in Lebanon", by Helen Davidson and Chi-hui Lin, The Guardian (9/18/24)
I do not wish to get embroiled in all of the accusations and counter-accusations of this highly sensitive, high stakes international incident, but I do want to call attention to an uncanny, seemingly offhand remark from the The Guardian article, namely, that Gold Apollo's glass entrance "was still festooned with leftover Lunar New Year decorations wishing for prosperity."
Since the event occurred around the time of the Mid-Autumn Festival (9/17/24), one might have thought that The Guardian slipped up and confused Mid-Autumn Festival decorations with Lunar New Year decorations. Examining the photograph for evidence one way or the other, I spotted the red poster on the wall behind CEO Hsu. Although the print is very small and I am on the road without a powerful magnifying glass, I think that the parallel verses of the matching couplet say:
niánnián hǎoyùn cáishén dào rìrì cáiyuán shùnyì lái
年年好運財神到 日日財源順意來
"May good luck and the God of Wealth arrive every year; may the source of wealth smoothly come every day"
http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/~bgzimmer/goldapollo2.jpg
This is a typical New Year's poster showing a messenger from the Heavenly Kingdom and wishing for good fortune during the coming year. We may refer to the figure as a ménshén 門神 ("door god"). They are customarily put on the door as spiritual guards on New Year’s Eve and they’d remain there for the rest of the year. The banner across his chest reads “gōngxǐ fācái / Cant. gung1 hei2 faat3 coi4 恭喜發財“ ("May you be happy and prosperous!") — a Chinese New Year greeting. Although it may seem gratuitous to mention this detail, I thought it was sharp for The Guardian not to mix up up the Chinese festivals while at the same time evoking the atmosphere at Gold Apollo which is still producing this (somewhat) outmoded technology and continues to make money from it.
Selected readings
* "2024 Lebanon pager explosions" (Wikipedia)
* "Cracking down on the Hezbollians" (7/19/06)
[h.t. AntC; thanks to Jing Hu, Zhaofei Chen, Xinyi Ye, and Judit Bagi]
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Slang of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub
eye-popping
amazingly large or impressive
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Idiom of the Day
get on like a house afire
Of two or more people, to enjoy one another's company very much from the start and become good friends at once. (Used when people are meeting for the first time.) Watch the video
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easier, and more accurate. Plans and proposals for lexicon, dictionary and thesaurus creation are also in place, which makes the website more worthwhile to watch out for in the future.
The author explains:
At the moment, the site consists of four major modules, with others still under active development:
1.
1. A high-resolution oracle bone font.
2. A database including over 52,288 glyphs.
3. A Multi-purpose text editor for inputting transcriptions.
4. Geographical and timeline visualizations.
In this two-part article, I will explain the programming technology that made them possible and the academic considerations behind the creation of these modules. In doing so, I hope that some reflections on my attempts regarding font development, database building, and interface design can be helpful for palaeography studies and the general field of DH.
The remainder of this long, first part of the two part post explains in technical detail how the font is constructed and how it is accessed and applied. The author concludes:
In general, this combination of the font as the base glyph compilation and the database interface as the base search tool firmly guarantees the correct input of desired oracle bone graphs and sets the foundation for future development of a genuine glyph database that covers the functions of a dictionary, lexicon, and eventually a transcription corpus. Some effort has to be made in order to become familiar with the functionalities of these modules of course. But compared to the current academic situation where everything is done by copy-pasting images, it is no doubt a worthwhile attempt towards the efficient utilization of the textual resources this field has to offer.
This is indeed a great improvement over the "drawing" and "copy-pasting" of individual glyphs (don't forget that there are 50,000+ of 'em!) that has heretofore constituted the state of the field. It's an ambitious project, but remains to be perfected and utilized.
A closing note. This post by Peichao Qin has appeared in The Digital Orientalist, which has also published scores of other posts on the application of DH and AI for the study of South Asian, Central Asian, East Asian, African, Middle Eastern, etc. languages, Selected readings
* "Nomadic affinity with oracle bone divination" (11/25/20)
* "Oracle" (3/21/14)
* "Paleographers, riches await you!" (10/28/16)
[Thanks to Geoff Wade]
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Parker yelled at us about some BS #CreatorsForKamala #gotv #DNC2024 #GeorgiaYoungDemocrats
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Language Log
Ask LLOG: Semicolons used as commas?
From Josh E.:
I am a big fan of your posts on the Language Log and was wondering whether you often see semicolons used the way we might normally use commas to set off a dependent clause. Here is an example I just saw:
A Massachusetts family is demanding a full investigation after a state police recruit died after being injured during a training exercise late last week at the Massachusetts State Police Academy.
Police said Enrique Delgado-Garcia, 25, of Worcester was injured and became unresponsive during a training exercise Thursday on defensive tactics. He died the next day. […]
McGhee said he put about 400 to 500 recruits through the program without issue, and noted the academy has since trained thousands.
“While this is a tragedy, and it never should have happened; injuries to this level are very rare,” he said.
When I started teaching a decade ago, I rarely saw this issue. Now, I see it all the time in both undergraduate and professionally published writing. Is there a term for this kind of flattening of punctuation distinctions? Or would Geoff Pullum put me up there with Strunk and White as being wrong in my basic understanding?
FWIW, I'd be surprised if Geoff defended that semicolon.
I don't share the impression that similar errors have become more common, but that may be related to my acknowledged status as the World's Worst Proofreader…
What do the rest of you think?
We should note that the cited semicolons might be an editing error, rather than a reflection of the writer's punctuation preferences…
Some past posts with a connection to semicolons, though mostly not relevant to this question:
"Jane Austen: missing the points", 11/17/2010
"Death before syntax?", 10/20/2014
"More on grammar, punctuation, and prosody", 12/19/2017
"Peeving and breeding", 3/4/2018
"Barstool punctuation", 4/4/2020
"Trends", 3/27/2022
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Word of the Day
Word of the Day: disproportionate
This word has appeared in 283 articles on NYTimes.com in the past year. Can you use it in a sentence?
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Phrasal Verb of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub
take off (2)
If a plane takes off, it leaves the ground and rises into the sky.
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Word of the Day
smug
Definition: (adjective) Exhibiting or feeling great or offensive satisfaction with oneself or with one's situation; self-righteously complacent.
Synonyms: self-satisfied.
Usage: On his face was the smug look of a toad breakfasting on fat marsh flies.
Discuss
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Language Log
How to say "AI" in Mandarin
An eminent Chinese historian just sent these two sentences to me:
Yǒurén shuō AI zhǐ néng jìsuàn, ér rénlèi néng suànjì. Yīncǐ AI yīdìng bùshì rénlèi duìshǒ
有人說AI只能計算，而人類能算計。因此AI一定不是人類對手。
"Some people say that AI can only calculate, while humans can compute. Therefore, AI must not be a match for humans".
Google Translate, Baidu Fanyi, and Bing Translate all render both jìsuàn 計算 and suànjì 算計 as "calculate". Only DeepL differentiates the two by translating the latter as "do math".
DeepL is on the right track that jìsuàn 計算 and suànjì 算計 need to be distinguished in the sentences under consideration, but I think that suànjì 算計 might better be rendered as "compute" — in this pair of sentences.
Be that as it may, how do you say "AI" in Mandarin (which is the point of this post)? AI.
Of course, you can also translate "AI" into "réngōng zhìhuì 人工智慧" (more popular in Taiwan and the Sinophone world outside mainland China) or "réngōng zhìnéng 人工智能" (preferred on the mainland), but from observation and asking around, it appears that most Chinese who have even a passing acquaintance with what AI / artificial intelligence is prefer to refer to it as "AI" in daily discourse — even those who do not know English. In other words, not only has the Latin alphabet become part of the Chinese writing system, as we have shown numerous times on Language Log, countless English terms, even those written in the Latin alphabet, have become part of the Mandarin and other Sinitic topolect lexicons.
As a savvy M.A. student from the PRC explains:
People wouldn’t think “Oh damn this is a person who wants to brag that they know English” when we use certain English words like AI, offer, deadline, or American terms like NBC, but they would if we use other English words that are not often directly used in English, like if you use “ROI” (return on investment, a very popular term among bankers) in a Chinese conversation (e.g., zhè bǐ jiāoyì de ROI shì shénme 这笔交易的ROI是什么 ["What is the ROI of this transaction?"]), people might think you’re showing off your ability to speak English, etc.
We are already in the early stages of China Babel.
Selected readings
* "Pinyin vs. English" (10/20/23)
* "The Englishization of Chinese enters a new phase" (8/8/24)
* "China Babel" (3/26/24)
* Mark Hansell, "The Sino-Alphabet: The Assimilation of Roman Letters into the Chinese Writing System," Sino-Platonic Papers, 45 (May, 1994), 1-28 (pdf)
[Thanks to Zhaofei Chen, Xinyi Ye, Jing Hu, and Chenfeng Wang]
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ool of Finance, very good, very smart—you know, if you’re a conservative Republican, if I were a liberal, if, like, OK, if I ran as a liberal Democrat, they would say I'm one of the smartest people anywhere in the world—it’s true!—but when you're a conservative Republican they try—oh, do they do a number—that’s why I always start off: Went to Wharton, was a good student, went there, went there, did this, built a fortune—you know I have to give my like credentials all the time, because we're a little disadvantaged—but you look at the nuclear deal, the thing that really bothers me—it would have been so easy, and it's not as important as these lives are (nuclear is powerful; my uncle explained that to me many, many years ago, the power and that was 35 years ago; he would explain the power of what's going to happen and he was right—who would have thought?), but when you look at what's going on with the four prisoners—now it used to be three, now it’s four—but when it was three and even now, I would have said it's all in the messenger; fellas, and it is fellas because, you know, they don't, they haven't figured that the women are smarter right now than the men, so, you know, it's gonna take them about another 150 years—but the Persians are great negotiators, the Iranians are great negotiators, so, and they, they just killed, they just killed us.
My response:
Geoff Pullum uses terms like "aphasia", and phrases like "I don't think there's any structure in there", in describing a quoted passage from Donald Trump's 7/21/2015 speech in Sun City SC. But in my opinion, he's been misled by a notorious problem: the apparent incoherence of much transcribed extemporized speech, even when the same material is completely comprehensible and even eloquent in audio or audio-visual form.
This apparent incoherence has two main causes: false starts and parentheticals. Both are effectively signaled in speaking — by prosody along with gesture, posture, and gaze — and therefore largely factored out by listeners. But in textual form, the cues are gone, and we lose the thread.
Has anything changed?
Certainly not the false starts and parentheticals, and also not the repetitions and the associative jumps in topic. And there's even consistency in the focus on how others don't give him the credit that he deserves. I have the impression that a detailed analysis of his various rhetorical irregularities might show a quantitative increase in some dimensions — but I haven't done that yet, and neither has anyone else.
Donald Trump's rhetorical style is certainly different from most other contemporary American politicians. And there are plenty of plausible comparisons to alcoholic speech (though Trump is a teetotaler) and to the effects of various neuropsychological disorders, including some of those associated with aging. But his style is clearly effective in reaching an audience, and there's no clear evidence of any recent changes.
For (a list of far too many) more posts on related topics, see "Past posts on Donald Trump's rhetoric".
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Word of the Day
suppliant
Definition: (noun) One praying humbly for something.
Synonyms: petitioner, requester, supplicant.
Usage: "Oh, God!" prayed the kneeling suppliant, "protect my husband, guard my son, and take my wretched life instead!"
Discuss
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Slang of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub
whacked | whacked out
to be very tired, or very intoxicated from the use of alcohol or drugs
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Idiom of the Day
like rats abandoning a sinking ship
With great haste and having only personal well-being in mind. (Typically said of people who begin abandoning something or someone that is failing or about to fail.) Watch the video
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Word of the Day
Word of the Day: denigrate
This word has appeared in 61 articles on NYTimes.com in the past year. Can you use it in a sentence?
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Phrasal Verb of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub
save up
to put something aside for the future
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Word of the Day
interpenetrate
Definition: (verb) Spread or diffuse through.
Synonyms: imbue, permeate, pervade, diffuse, riddle, penetrate.
Usage: Crossing his arms on his chest, as if to control this new sensation of delight, he drank in delicious draughts of that mysterious air which interpenetrates at night the loftiest forests.
Discuss
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Language Log
Font making for oracle bone inscription studies
"Jingyuan Digital Platform: Font Making and Database Development for Shang Oracle Bones (Part 1)", Peichao Qin, The Digital Orientalist (9/17/24)
If you're wondering what "Jingyuan" means, it's a fancy, allusive way to say "Mirrored contexts [for thorough investigations]" ([gézhì] jìngyuán [格致]鏡原) (source), just a means for the creator of the platform to give it a proprietary designation.
A goodly proportion of Language Log readers probably have some idea of what oracle bone inscriptions are, but just to refresh our memories and for the benefit of new and recent readers who are not familiar with the history of Sinographic scripts, I'm going to jump right into the third paragraph of Qin's article, which is like a basic primer of oracle bone inscription studies.
Oracle bone inscriptions (OBI), also known as the oracle bone script, can be dated to the later part of the Shang dynasty (ca. 1250 B.C. – 1046 B.C.). It is the inscriptional product of pyromantic divination conducted by Shang elites, a controlled process of systematic drilling of hollows and burning of metal rods to produce cracks on turtle shells or ox scapulae, and the subsequent record-keeping practices of Shang scribes to keep track of the relevant divination events (also see Henry’s post). The oracle bone script, in general, is known to possess highly complex character structures and a huge number of variant forms. Since its first discovery in 1899, over 4,000 characters and 50,000 distinct variants have been identified. The 125-year-long development of the scholarship has produced a lot of useful literature related to the decipherment studies of individual characters and transcriptions for published oracle bone corpora, offering invaluable materials for relevant linguistic and historical examinations of the Shang dynasty. However, the lack of font support and coherent encoding for both archaic and modern forms of the oracle bone characters, and the long absence of efficient database query support have often made the field rather difficult to navigate for both beginners and advanced learners. The input of oracle bone glyphs and database building have been constantly relying on copying and pasting rubbings [of] images which are not so easily indexed and searched.
To return to the beginning of the post, wherein the author gives the rationale for their creation of the platform:
Tired of struggling to find and type out complex oracle bone script characters? You’re not alone. For years, scholars and enthusiasts alike have faced the frustrating challenges of working with these ancient inscriptions—challenges that stem from the lack of a proper font and efficient search tools. An insane number of characters, variants and transcriptions are out there right now thanks to more-than-a-century-long discoveries and research. Imagine spending hours and hours just trying to locate a single glyph or having to manually piece together characters from a mixture of strokes and blot marks using low-resolution rubbings. This not only creates problems for scholars who want to read the texts and search for the relevant literature, but also for enthusiasts who just want to type the character and create non-pixelated artworks. This was the reality for the oracle bone script, until now.
I’m excited to introduce the Jingyuan Digital Platform, a brand-new solution designed to transform how we interact with Shang oracle bone inscriptions. This platform offers two major game-changing tools: the world’s first ultra high-resolution font for oracle bone script (available for free download here) and a comprehensive, user-friendly search engine for these ancient glyphs. Whether you’re typing in Word, designing a poster, or conducting in-depth research, the platform streamlines the entire process, making it faster,[...]
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Man-maids Tale
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Language Log
AI-based DeepL is different
So says DeepL CEO Jarek Kutylowski.
"DeepL translation targets Taiwan as next key Asian market: CEO says AI-based model is aiming to refine nuances, politeness", Steven Borowiec, Nikkei staff writer (September 16, 2024)
DeepL Write is one thing, DeepL Translator is another. We've examined both on Language Log and are aware that the former is already deeply entrenched as a tool for composition assistance, but are less familiar with the special features of the latter.
The article by Borowiec, based on his interview with CEO Jarek Kutylowski, begins with some not very enlightening remarks about the difference between simplified characters on the mainland and traditional characters on Taiwan, attesting to the truism that CEOs and CFOs often don't know as much about the nitty-gritty technicalities of the products they sell as do the scientists and specialists they hire to make them.
The article then focuses on the business aspects of DeepL, where Kutylowski is on much firmer ground, when he tells us how many hundreds of millions of dollars investment DeepL's translation software has attracted and how many billions of dollars of valuation it has achieved.
When the conversation turns to more general concepts of different approaches to machine translation, I perked up and was all ears.
DeepL was founded in 2017 and touted itself as the first online translation platform to use neural networks and machine learning.
The model was fed countless examples of translated sentences in each language in order to teach it to recognize the natural structures of sentences, Kutylowski explained. He contrasted this with the more conventional approach, in which models rely on estimates of probability and try to "guess" which words are most likely to follow one another in a sentence.
…
Jarek, a native speaker of Polish, pointed to how his mother tongue and other languages have different forms of address depending on the level of familiarity between speakers.
He hopes to soon introduce improvements to DeepL that can improve the quality of translations in such areas. "What helps the AI to solve those problems is having a lot of context. We are actually working on some technology that is going to allow us to solve that by trying to gather that information and trying to gather that context from the user, when it's necessary. I expect that to be available pretty soon."
I have often exclaimed how remarkably good Google Translate is, and I'm absolutely astonished at how many different languages it can translate to and from, but DeepL is aspiring to give it a run for the money.
Selected readings
* "How to say 'AI' in Mandarin" (9/17/24)
* "DeepL Translator" (2/16/23) — lengthy post that gives a detailed demonstration of how DeepL works in comparison with Google Translate, WeChat, and a human being (linguist-Sinilogist)
* "Uh-oh! DeepL in the classroom; it's already here" (2/22/23)
* "Competing chatbots" (7/19/23)
* "Google Translate is even better now" (9/27/16)
* "Google Translate is even better now, part 2" (5/12/22)
* "Google is scary good" (7/31/17)
[Thanks to Don Keyser]
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Slang of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub
up the duff
pregnant
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Idiom of the Day
need (something) (about) as much as (one) needs a hole in the head
To have absolutely no need or use for something. Watch the video
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Funny Or Die (Youtube)
We Found The Most Enthusiastic DNC-Goer of All Time
What better way to observe National Voter Registration Day then to feature the President of Georgia Young Democrats, Parker Short. He's here, he's enthused, he may have had a couple of beers. Watch Parker FINALLY reveal his favorite curse word & more!
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Language Log
What did Rich Lowry say?
Yesterday, Alejandra Caraballo tweeted:
The editor in chief of the National Review just said the N word in regards to Haitians and Megyn Kelly ignores it.
Andy McCarthy responded:
Ridiculous. @richlowry (not tagged here, natch) obviously got crossed up between 'immigrants' (short i) and migrants (long i) — started mispronouncing "migrants" with short i; instantly corrected himself with no embarrassment because it was patently a mispronunciation. Geez.
And Rich Lowry agreed:
Yep, this is exactly what happened—I began to mispronounce the word “migrants” and caught myself halfway through
Ben Zimmer emailed me:
Got sent this from a friend, who was hoping to see some analysis of whether the initial consonant on the misspeak here is /m/ or /n/. (Since the previous consonant is the final /n/ in "Haitian," there may be some gestural overlap.)
Here's the full clip from Alejandra Caraballo's tweet:
Your browser does not support the audio element.
A transcript of Lowry's part of the clip:
I love- I think it was in- in that interview
where Dana Bash says ((you know))
"police have gone through eleven months of recordings of calls
and they've only found two Springfield residents calling
to complain about Haitian ((??)) n- m- uh migrants
taking
geese
from ponds, only two calls and
I think one lesson of this whole story
people don't care about geese
people really hate geese
you know they- they-
all things considered I think
people'd prefer Haitian migrants
to come and take the geese off the golf course, right
So it's- it's pets- it's uh the cats and dogs that's become the-
the standard, gee- geese clearly don't matter
And the contested phrase:
Your browser does not support the audio element.
to complain about Haitian ((??)) n- m- uh migrants
Just the part that I've transcribed as "Haitian ((???))", with a spectrogram:
Your browser does not support the audio element.
http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/myl/LowryBashHaitiansX1a.png
It's easy to hear (and see) why Caraballo heard and wrote what she did — phonetically, ((???))) is clearly [ˡnɪgɚ].
The /nn/ nasal reflex of "Haitian n…" is 95 milliseconds long, and thus clearly represents a sequence of a syllable-final and a syllable-initial nasal. The stable acoustics of the nasal murmur isn't consistent with re-articulation from /n/ to /m/ part-way through. And the formant transitions from the nasal consonant into the following [ɪ] vowel (F2 starting at 1900 Hz) indicate a coronal rather than labial place of articulation.
That conclusion is made more persuasive by comparing the next bits, where Lowry produces a sequence of false starts that might be transcribed phonetically as [n- mʔ- ə-] before going on to say "migrants":
Your browser does not support the audio element.
So McCarthy's explanation is wrong: Lowry did not "[start] mispronouncing 'migrants' with short i".
However, Lowry is clearly in speech-error mode, and what he said after "Haitian" is clearly a substitution for "migrants", and "immigration" does offer a confusable phoneme sequence.
So what he said is clear, in phonetic terms: it was [ˡnɪgɚ]. As for why he said it, there's a range of explanations from a word-substitution error, perhaps of the Freudian slip variety, to an innocent phonemic scramble of the general type that McCarthy proposes.
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