BBC “Word 4 Word”

Word 4 Word est une nouvelle émission de la BBC Radio 4 sur la langue, liée à son projet de documentation des dialectes britanniques, Voices.

La première épisode est programmée pour aujourd’hui, dans une heure à peu près.

Je vous ferai un topo sur les émissions deradio sur la langue un de ces jours.

BBC Radio 4 has a new programme#[1] on language which will air once a week through August and September: Word 4 Word . It is part of the BBC Voices project and produced with the Open University, so this might be quite interesting.

Quoting Dermot Murnaghan off the Voices page:

Language is a badge. We wear it like invisible uniform that declares where we come from, what we do, whom we like to talk to and hang out with.

In the former pit villages of Northumberland, the winding gear is silent now. The wholesale closure of most of Britain’s coalmines saw to that. But what of the rich, distinctive dialect that made Ashington distinct from Bedlington, and Seaton Delaval different from market-town Morpeth? […]

“Word 4 Word” is all about local talk, about this sense of belonging as expressed through the words we use to frame our thoughts. But what we’re trying to do, too, is investigate some of the big changes that are underway in the vernacular of regional Britain. Not so much the decline of dialect as its evolution.

The first programme of this series airs (”nets”? “cables”?) today at 9 a.m. BST (that’s in just about an hour) and will be available (Real Audio — as far as I can tell they aren’t podcasting it yet) from the linked site, probably for the next week or so.

I’ll have a listen and may be reporting back on language-related radio shows. There’s quite a large variety of those around.


[1]: This is one of the few Brit-spelled words that I always want to Ami-spell. Computer science oblige.


Céline, qui blogue sur Naked Translations, connaît un chanoine — « Canon », en V.O., attention à la polysémie ! — à la retraite qui lui a fait un dessin merveilleux du plan-type d’une église anglaise, avec toutes les parties étiquetées.

Moi, je l’ai téléchargé pour le mettre dans mes fichiers de référence.


No word too small

Comment les articles de l’anglais tissent des liens entre êtres humains, pourvu qu’ils bloguent [hé, c’est un subjonctif, ça !].

You know, a little over a year ago, I was wondering whether blogging was an activity I should take up. I was hesitant for a while because it seemed you had to be either your own journalist, which I am not, or to spend a considerable amount of time gazing at your own navel.

I was, of course, wrong. Not because there aren’t a lot of navel-gazing blogs out there — and it’s a perfectly fine activity, if you’re into it. No, what I had underestimated was the community aspect of blogging. In addition to local meet-ups and communal efforts organised around a particular blogging platform, it’s the tool itself that makes sure that bloggers whose interests overlap in some way or other will find each other if they are so inclined.

I’ve been quite touched by how easy it is for us to develop social bonds. Leaving comments may develop into exchanging e-mail or hanging out in the same IRC channel. Those who know me in the corporeal world may be aware that I can be painfully shy about things like that. When I dropped off the web for two months earlier this year, my ircquaintances and those involved in the same online projects kept enquiring after me, which helped bring me back.

Now, when Mark Liberman — to whose Language Log posts I’ve sometimes been playing sortof a Greek chorus via email and blog entries here — became interested in the pronunciation of the and a, his post showed up in my aggregator, and I was, as so often, intrigued. So I looked at recordings by speakers I had listened to before and happened upon one by Ed Felten. Ed Felten, in turn, saw my post — either in his referrer stats or via a backlink-and-blog search engine like Technorati (hi Kevin Marks, by the way) — and left a comment. I was just glad that he took my dissection of his speech in good humour, when I realised he had even taken up the small linguistic interest Mark Liberman and I have been taking in his thes and as on Freedom to Tinker, his own blog. Oh, and Mark Liberman, in turn, replied to Ed Felten’s post, where this post should be showing up as a trackback, if all goes right. La boucle est bouclée (“the loop is looped around”; or, etymologically, if not semantically, closer, “the buckle is buckled” ) as they say here.

I can understand Ed Felten’s consternation at being commented on, for once, not for his forceful insights into DRM, copyright, and the way the law and the actions of big media companies shape the pubic debate — he is used to that –, but for his language. And not even for something solid like verbs and nouns, or grammar, or semantics, but for the way he pronounces his articles.

Well, I find the topic quite fascinating. Mark Liberman quite rightly analysed the instances not, as I did at first, as “correcting one’s pronunciation”, but looked strictly at whether the articles precede an utterance that starts with a vowel or a consonant sound (putting aside [j] — as in united or university — and [h] for the moment). And if Ed Felten now finds himself “listening to every speaker [he] hear[s], to see whether they do it too”, I have fallen victim to a similar fixation, hearing “ph.-pr.” (now how does he pronounce that) unreduced the [ði] and a [ɛj] literally#[1] everywhere.

Listen, for example, to this snippet (.wav) from an interview with the copy editor, author and blogger Bill Walsh:

  • wild art is the uh newsroom term for a stand-alone photograph

We have an unreduced the before the disfluency “uh”; and an unreduced a before a consonant, without any pause, pseudo or not.

This fascination rather reminds me of one of the most engaging teachers I had in high school, back in Germany. He was a trainee teacher during the two semesters he took our class for Ancient Greek, and he made all the little errors and exhibited all the insecurities this state brings with itself#[2]. But he did know his stuff, and the way he approached the horrors of the irregular verbs and the labyrinth of Greek adverbs and particles — with love and tender care — somehow got through to us. When he told us of his Master’s thesis on, if I remember correctly, frequencies of a number of particles and elisions in Homer, the bunch of 16-year-olds that we were could only frown in consternation. But his passion was quite unstoppable, and we even learnt something.

(If only how to deduce the translation passage on the exam on the Iliad he gave us — he had dropped too many hints about a rare sense of a particular verb here and an elided particle there, and we were quite capable of searching through the text ourselves. We did tell him, over a beer, when the entire class went out grilling sausages just before the end of the school year and had invited him along. And he had been so proud that eight out of a class of 27 had managed the grade 1 (roughly, an A) on what had supposedly been a tough exam on the hardest text you do in your third year of high-school Ancient Greek…)


[1]: This is the spurious usage of literally, of course, which serves to reinforce a statement. [2]: I sympathise very much. My own two years were not an easy time, to put it mildly; suffice it to say that I didn’t survive in the French public school system. Neither, to my knowledge, did he in the German one.


Thy “thee”s, Ed Felten…

Quelques observations concernant la prononciation, réduite ou pleine, des articles a et the devant consonne dans un échantillon d’anglais américain parlé.

Some of Mark Liberman’s recent Language Log posts were dealing with dealing with reduced vs. unreduced vowels in the pronunciation of the articles a and the. (Reduced: [ə] and [ðə]; unreduced: [ɛɪ] (or [ɛj]) and [ði:]). In his latest post, he examined a G. W. Bush speech and found that, as other readers had claimed, […]

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Nouns and verbs on #wordpress

Les habitués du salon IRC #wordpress aiment bien parler langue et langage. La conversation reprise ici est en anglais, mais le salon est en général ouvert aux autres langues, et bon nombre des participants en parlent plusieurs.

In our ongoing series Language topics on the #wordpress IRC channel, we present the latest instalment. This morning’s discussions mainly dealt with nouns and verbs, and the purity of English. The participants were spread out between Lausanne and Tokyo, and most but not all of them are native speakers of English (at least two are […]

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You wouldn’t have thought what you can learn …

J’ai appris un mot anglo-anglais pour faire des grimaçes.

… from reading an article on computer security: The choice of a gurning picture may indicate that the worm’s writer is British. Gurning is an ancient Cumbrian practice of pulling a funny face and is famously practised in the village of Egremont at its annual crab apple fair. I had never heard of gurning before, […]

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Garden paths

Les chemins du jardin qui mènent dans la brousse. Syntaxiquement parlant.

Microsoft debuts a malicious software removal tool today. (link) — Just glad I don’t have any Microsoft software on my computer any more. I might inadvertently install the malicious tool. Powell Surveys Devastated Area — A headline quoted from memory, from, I think, USA Today (which would have been USA Yesterday, or rather USA The-Previous-Day), which […]

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Reading

Les verbes à particule anglais, et la célèbre citation qui n’est pas par Churchill.

  • 2004-12-15
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Putting this entry in the category “inspiration” feels quite wrong. This hasn’t been a good week, on several counts, and I’ve been suffering from a painful lack of inspiration. However, that’s precisely the reason it has to be categorised thus. In times like these, reading remains, and there may be a pinch of escapism in it. […]

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More Scots

Lien vers un beau document audio en anglais écossais.

  • 2004-08-25
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Yet another English audio document in an accent other than Estuary English (also known as “BBC English ”) or what is sometimes called “General American”: Here are excerpts from several of poems by Robert Burns read in a Scottish accent. Via Blogging in Paris, from where Claude Covo-Farchi remarks on the “translation” of the film title […]

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Are women human?

Une longue diatribe contre un ami qui a osé critiquer ma traduction anglaise d’une citation de Térence.

The other day, Dr Dave at unknowngenius passionately disputed something I had said earlier. My crime? Having suggested that in Terence’s line Homo sum: humani nil a me alienum puto. the word homo should be translated as human being. I should, of course, know better than to reply to a post in which the term “PC” […]

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