The adjective regulatory
is a ho-hum word, which we Americans pronounce REG-yu-la-tor-ee, with the stress-pattern
of the underlying verb, REG-yu-late.
But in England, it is often pronounced reg-yu-LAY-tor-ee,
with stress on the third syllable, and a long vowel. This strikes
an American oddly, the first time you hear it, until you consider that it
simply matches the pattern of the related noun, which both sides of the
Atlantic pronounce as reg-yu-LAY-shun.
Well, you say tomahto, I say tomayto, right? Not
quite.
For such interplay of stress-patterns, which in English is
characteristic only of Latinate loanwords, comes with its own internal
logic. Thus consider:
=>
How do you pronounce classificatory
? <=
An Englishman has no trouble with this: klass-i-fi-KAY-tor-ee.
Whereas an American would have to resort to KLASS-i-fik-a-tor-ee, with no fewer
than five unstressed syllables trailing limply along after the
nucleus. It sounds like a coffee-mug falling downstairs.
In the case of classificatory,
British English exhibits a crisp double-dactyl; American, a stress
followed by a quinquisyllablic mumble. But in the case of involuntarily, the roles are
reversed: American has six distinct syllables, either as a double-dactyl
or a triple iamb (
in-vol-un-TAR-i-lee, in-vol-un-TAR-i-lee, whereas
British (as I just now heard the word pronounced by a master reader, Mr.
Frederik Davidson), can have just four rather mooshed one:
in-VOL-un-tr’ly.
Cf. further, re “conflation of repeated sequences
(haplology)”:
To judge from British habits of
articulating words like temporary, veterinary, there exist both hesitation and slurring in attempts to pronounce both [r-initial] syllables; then, in order to avoid this, speakers
settle for /tεmpǝri, vεtɪnrɪ
/,
-- M. L. Samuels, Linguistic
Evolution, with special reference to English (1972), p. 17
Many Americans (self included) slur these otherwise,
dropping not an r, but the schwa: TEMP-rar-y, VET-rin-ar-y.
An example in which the (or a) British pronunciation is more boneless than the American: qualitatively. Americans have a secondary accent on the third syllable, so that the whole is almost a triple troche. In the pronunciation used by professional reader Ralph Cosham, reading CSL's Letters to Malcolm, it began like the American version with chief stress on the first syllable, but then petered out into a succession of unaccented schwas, like air going out of a tire.
For further
pronunciation fun, click here:
~
A word about stress and vowel-tensing.
I have long fretted over the lack of convenient
pronunciation for the very useful word classificatory.
There exists, to be sure, a rough synonym, easily pronounceable by a babe in
arms: taxonomic; but this
word, in the context of Chomskyan linguistics, is sicklied o’er with the pale
cast of barf.
Having heard somewhere (Prof. Ch. Fillmore, probably) that
the Brits pronounce this word with penultimate stress, I somehow fell into
pronouncing it in my mind as klass-i-fi-KAT-or-ee, with a short stressed
vowel. An error, with no basis in pattern.
Now things begin to get interesting.
The other night, I dreamt that a certain young man’s job
prospects were
“cheb-i-CHEE-vi-an”
The pronunciation, with a tensed stressed vowel, is the
predictable result of adding the suffix -ian to the name Chebichev (CHEB-i-chev). The idea, within the dream,
was that his job prospects (respresentative of those of millennials generally)
were uncertain, like the shapes in a famous painting by an artist of that
name.
Even at the time, that struck me as an unusual word.
Upon waking, I seized upon the dream as a counter-example to Freud’s assertion
that the words we hear in dreams, we have heard before, or are a blend of several
such. Whereas here, the word is apparently not blended with anything, but
rather has been subjected to a phonological rule, with rare results.
The painting in question -- a favorite of my brother’s when
he was in high school, a reproduction of which hung on his wall after a family
visit to MOMA, where the original is displayed -- is called “Hide and
Seek”. Only, the artist’s name is Chelichev
(Tchelitchew), with an l instead of a
b. Chebichev was a mathematician, with whose work I am only
vaguely familiar.
FWIW.
~
Here
we are not really concerned with the pronunciation of this or that specific
word, nor with the amusing habits of our cousins across the pond (a description
that can be used no matter which side of the pond you yourself happen to hail from), but rather with the phonological economy of a language --
cf. Martinet’s classic L’Economie des changement phonétiques. That is to say, our perspective
is (in happy parallel to the modern tendency of differential geometry) no
longer local, but global:
considering a linguistic-units fate only in tandem with that of its fellows. The textbook example being the Great
Vowel Shift, in which the articulatory trapezoid, the Germanic vowel-whale, rolled slowly over in its
sleep.
In
the case of an American baffled by classificatory,
or an Englishman tripped-up by involuntarily,
we see the paradoxical situation
of a speaker left in the lurch by his own language. Part of the explanation for the possibility of this,
is that, to an extent, it is not our
own language, not entirely: a
large unruly immigrant population of Graeco-Latin Fremdgut, along with borrowings of a greater or lesser residual
flavor of Frenchness, have come to disturb the simply Saxon pattern: mostly forestress, and transparent
structural reasons when not;
vowel-alternations minor. There is no native analogue of
the insanely contra-semantic and even contramorphological wordstress in psychology, where the least-important,
merely-transitional syllable gets the stress (versus the natural psychic, or the less-than-ideal but
still defensible psychological). Even a simple French
disyllable like garage gets us all in a worrit: Americans pronounce it to rhyme with massage or mirage, Englishmen to rhyme with carriage. And
when it comes to a word like internecine -- all bets are off.
The
fault by no means lies in any pointless, Basque-like complexity of the lending
languages: in Latin and in French,
the stress-patterns are as easy as can be. Yet somehow English managed to ingest these borrowings
sideways, or wrong-way-round: like
that classic jest of third-grade playgrounds -- pull a pinch of skin out from
either side of your neck; “What’s this?”; (kid says) “I dunno”; (you say) “A
moron swallowing a pencil.”
French,
by contrast, virtually never suffers so dramatic an orthoëpic quandary; but then, it pays a larger
metrical price, quite lacking the resources to construct something as stunning
as “Sir Patrick Spens” or “Pied Beauty”. To anyone whose blood still thrills to the rhythms of our helmed and
byrnied ancestors, such milksop codswallop as the alexandrin is near-beer at best.
~
A
couple of further concrete examples.
Just
now I happened upon a sentence in M.L. Samuels’ Linguistic Evolution
(1972), that read: “A comparison
of three Dravidian languages has shown that simplificatory changes of phonology and grammar take place …” (p. 108).
Now,
the author teaches in Glasgow.
Were he American, or solicitous of American readers, he would have
written simplifying or even simplificational -- the latter, though
exactly as much a mouthful as simplificatory,
is at least instantly clear in pronunciation.
[Update
11 May 2014] Another example from Mr. Davidson (a.k.a. David Case), again
from Bleak House: "with his confirmatory cough",
stressed còn-fir-MAY-tor-ee.
~
It
has long been pointed out, that an extremely arcane writing-system like that of
Chinese or Japanese, as opposed to a maximally transparent one like that of
Spanish, reserves literacy for a kind of scribal priest-caste, and those
beholden to it. Certainly, the
English spelling-system, which is rather a mess (though much closer to the
Spanish end of the spectrum, than the Mandarin), presents burdens to whose
would observe the niceties of orthography (less so to any who are content
simply to read): but all that is
not pertinent to the problem noticed here. Our bafflement at how to pronounce certain words,
has little to do with the writing-system, nor with any mandarin impositions of any
sort. The fact is, words like confirmatory and classificatory lie already implicit in the language, for anyone who
uses the words confirm/confirmation
and classify/classification. The the problem, how to pronounce
these less-familiar derivata, is identical, whether you are analphabetic or an
English professor.
(It
does have a little something to do
with the writing-system, however.
In Latin, (Classical) Arabic, and Spanish, you can tell from the
spelling which syllable is
stressed: in the former cases, owing to certain simple syllabic rules; in the last-named case, likewise save
for certain exceptions, which however are called-out to the reader by an acute
accent over the stressed vowel.)
Thus,
only the other day, I put up a post (“Dylan Mystery Album”) which used
one of my favorite words [Alert to logophiliacs:] resipiscence. Which I have come across in
reading, and savored, yet have never heard pronounced. And so, before publically using it
(albeit not orally), I looked up the received pronunciation (fortunately, it
turns out, there is only one), and was startled to learn that it differed from
what I had always silently said to myself in my mind’s ear: the approved pronunciation has
main stress on the third syllable.
[Update
July 2016] Reading aloud one
evening, my wife pronounced indefatigable
as in-de-fa-TEEG-a-ble -- quite on the measure of British class-i-fi-CATE-or-ee. I personally say
in-de-FAT-ig-a-ble; but that is
morphosemantically opaque, whereas her version nicely brings out the notional
relation to fatigue (with its
French-derived oxytone). Might
this be another case where the Brits displace the accent? But no, according to the dictionaries,
no; she came up with it on her own
hook.
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