the peroles of "whore"

i was watching the pregame coverage of the Packers - Lions football game today and noticed the continuation of a somewhat disturbing trend: strange pronunciations in the singing of The Star-Spangled Banner. now you should know that i'm certainly no prescriptivist, so this has to be offending some other sensibility of mine. my one peeve is certainly more legitimate than the other.

prior to today's game, the singer (whose name i unfortunately missed) pronounced the word perilous rather strangely, with a definite [o] as the nucleus of the middle syllable. i know that singing coaches often fiddle with vowel quantities, but i wonder what motivated the distinction to change [ɨ] or [ə] to [o]. it certainly wasn't by analogy to the stem which perilous is formed from, namely peril, in which the corresponding syllable is pronounced with [ɪ], which is perfectly acceptable in most voice coaching systems, to the extent that i'm familiar with them. based on some standard assumptions about back-formation and english orthography, you would guess that the stem is perole. but as i said, this is a bit more of a peeve than anything else—it doesn't really detract from the song.

what does detract from a national anthem, designed to honor our country, is the gratuitous aspiration of vowel-initial words when singing. sometimes it's even more pronounced than some sort of aspiration, and is an actual addition of [h] to the beginning of the word. this is dangerous within the context of the phrasing of our national anthem. i have heard several performers turn "o'er the land of the free..." into what very distinctly sounds like "whore the land of the free..." this sounds like an imperative verb with the interpretation "sell out the land of the free for sexual favors." now i think the whole ho ho ho debacle with the Australian Santa Clauses is absurd, but clearly pronouncing the word whore in the middle of the national anthem—even unintentionally—is really a bad idea, regardless of who it's offending. so please, respect our country, and watch your pronunciation, at least when you're singing on national TV.

quick takes; hiatus

this is a very very short post, as i'm very busy. i won't be around to make any new posts until at least monday night, and probably not until tuesday. so here we go!

immature moments in phonology
in my phonology class yesterday, we were looking at a data set. i had to stifle a few giggles as i looked over one of the examples. this is probably funny even if you don't know IPA: fʌkkʌrʌ. i'm glad it was only referred to as "example 3" and not read aloud.

resumptive pronoun sighting
i noticed this yesterday while reading an article about file-sharing lawsuits:

It then demands the institution to turn over the identities of the individuals to whom the IP addresses were assigned to.

these constructions made the headlines over at language log a while back. no time to add anything new to that, but it stuck out to me!

gotta run now. have a good weekend!

as winter approaches...

it can be dangerous when you gather together a bunch of linguists, give them alcohol, and sit them down around a bonfire. or it can be a lot of fun, but you might get some strange conversations. one such conversation that happened last night was an argument about the possible lexical categories of the word blizzard. i have, as far as i can remember, always used it as both a noun and a verb. other people, some of whom are from regions where blizzards are common enough occurrences, maintained that they couldn't ever use it as a verb.

we'd already had a conversation earlier in the night about how Google is a great quick-and-dirty corpus tool, so i combined the two discussions to find the following results:

word	lex. cat.	# hits
blizzard	N	30,500,000
blizzards	N/V	1,840,000
blizzarding	V	10,300
blizzarded	V	2,610

the noun form obviously is dominant, but the verbal forms are also attested pretty well. although Google's sorting of results is a definite bias, in the first few pages there are more uses of blizzard to refer to things that are not snowstorms (including the video game company, the Dairy Queen ice cream concoction, and a minor league sports team or two), but i'm fairly confident that in less popular results the prevalent meaning refers to the weather.

next i turned to the OED to see whether it has an entry for blizzard as a verb. they only give a past participle, which i thought was a bit strange. i can equally well say both:

it blizzarded twice in Cleveland last year
it's blizzarding outside now

like other weather verbs in English, i cannot use a simple present form of the verb, but only the frequentative

it blizzards/snows every winter here
*it blizzards/snows outside now

the only thing that puzzled me more than the OED's inclusion of only the past participle is their lone example of it, which has nothing to do with weather phenomena:

1892 GUNTER Miss Dividends I. vi. 67 Then he suddenly ejaculates ‘Well I'm blizzarded!’

therefore i have to return to my own intuitions to figure out anything more about the verbhood of blizzard. as far as i can tell, i use it in the exact same distribution that i use storm, as both noun and verb. this makes sense, since blizzard is semantically a subset of storm. there is, however, one blizzard-like phenomenon (note i don't say blizzardly, despite the fact that the OED attests it, but only with examples from the 19th century) which is strictly a noun in my mental lexicon: white-out. it falls in the same category as fog, not storm. the difference to me is that a storm or blizzard is a process, whereas a white-out or fog is a state. therefore it fogged, is fogging, is whiting-out, is white-outing, whited-out, or white-outed are all awful to me. i don't know if anyone wants to disagree with me on any of those points.

i think that's all i have to say about blizzarding for now, other than the fact that i hope it doesn't snow for at least a few more weeks.

Benny Lava revisited

thanks to the sleuthing of an anonymous commenter, i've discovered the true identity of the Benny Lava song. it's by the Indian artist Prabhu Deva, and the title of the song is "Kalluri Vaanil." once you know that, it's easy to find the real lyrics, so i had to do a comparison. note the English codeswitches in the original Tamil lyrics, which i've bolded:

Male
Kalluri vaanil kaayndha nilaavo?
My looney bun is fine, Benny Lava!
Maanavar nenjil meyndha nilaavo?
Minor bun engine made Benny Lava!
En madi meedhu saayndha nilaavo?
Anybody need this sign? Benny Lava!
Ennidam vandhu vaayndha nilaavo?
You need a bun to bite Benny Lava!

so we can see the origin of the name Benny Lava. each instance comes from the Tamil string -dha nilaavo. i'd personally expect something like Donny Lavo, or Denny, or Johnny, but we got Benny instead. the change of an accurately heard [la:vo] to Lava is natural, since it's the closest approximation that's actually an English word.

we can also see that the English comes from a mix of logical correlations and total fabrication. (n)enjil --> engine is highly plausible, as is the entire anybody need this sign line. there's also a fairly uniform interpretation of [v] as [b].

Haikuvae haikuvae... high speedil vandhaaye…
Have you been high today? I see the nuns are gay
Eyebrowai male thookki, I love you endraaye…
My brother yelled to me, I love you inside Ed

Buffalax missed a lot of English words here, only matching i love you (as did i on my first listening). haiku, which is well-established in English, is nevertheless a Japanese loan. i think the CV syllable structure of Japanese helps this blend in with the Tamil lyrics. high speed and eyebrow both get Tamil suffixes (huzzah word-internal codeswitching!), which helps to obfuscate them.

Female
Kalluri vaanil kaayndha nilaavo?
My looney bun is fine, Benny Lava!
Maanavar nenjil meyndha nilaavo?
Minor bun engine made Benny Lava!
Haikuvaai haikuvaai… I love you endraale…
I told a high school girl, I love you inside me

essentially the same as above. the hai of haiku makes one appearance as high in each instance.

I'd love to see you pee on us tonight! (x2)

the mystery line. i have no doubt that there is in fact singing going on here. and the transliteration sounds frighteningly accurate. but no version of the original lyrics includes this part of the song. so the humorous interpretation goes unchallenged here.

Male: April May eppodhum
You fill me up with doom
Female: veppaththil veppaththil
Quit looking up at me!
Male: Endraalum ennangal
You got a minute girl?
Female: theppaththil theppaththil
The puppy had a fee

i would have never noticed April May here. the monosyllable [meɪ] could be practically anything. furthermore it's rare to hear the two words back to back in English, except in a serial list of the months of the year.

a bigger problem starts to emerge here. throughout the rest of the song, repeated words often get completely different interpretations. here veppaththil --> quit looking and up at me, which couldn't be much more phonetically different. there also seems to be a trend of transcribing the aspirated dental stop as a labial, usually [p]. we'll see more of this later.

Female: Dolphin gal thullaadhaa...
Don't think I do love her
Male: Ullaththil ullaththil
We're looking in a pill
Male: vellaththil vellaththil
We're looking in a pill

another easy-to-miss English word, this time because the stress is on the wrong syllable. then there's more craziness with inconsistent interpretation. i think we're looking in a pill is one of the worst transcriptions of the entire song. it breaks up a repeated section into two unrelated pieces, then does the opposite by itself repeating when the original is clearly different. in the entire two lines, there is very little phonetic matching at all except for the final syllable.

Female: Pollaadha aadavaa...
All of them like the bun
Male: Naan pooppandhu aadavaa?
Now poop on them, Oliver!

while the peeing line remains shrouded in mystery, the pooping line is one of the most accurate (phonetically speaking) of the whole song.

Female: unnaale imsaigal undaagum podhum podhum
Ooh daddy, just say it, you know the hole to put it
Male: imsaigal ellaamay inbangal thaanammaa…
Just sing it! You love me! Your pundit got armor!
Female: ichchendra saththangal undagak koodum koodum...
You send me...offended...you know the hole to put it!
Male: saththangal ellaamay muththangal thaanammaa…
Just sing it! You love me! Your pundit got armor!
Female: Puppuppu poochendae… puyalil poraadum…
Who put the goat in there? The yellow goat I ate?

it's getting worse from here on out. ellaamay --> you love me is at least creative and somewhat thematically right. i don't particularly like your pundit got armor for two reasons: first, it's not particularly grammatical; second, the stress on armor is wrong. then there's the dissimilatory nightmare of who put the goat in there, in which four [p]s become [h], [p], [θ], and [g], not to mention the vowels.

Male: Kalluri vaanil kaayndha nilaavo?
My loony bun is fine, Benny Lava!
Female: Maanavar nenjil meyndha nilaavo?
Minor bun engine made Benny Lava!

(i like to swim in it)
(i like to swim in it)
(i like to swim in his beejay)

this interlude is somewhat interesting, since there isn't any actual singing going on, but the tones of the instruments do evoke the spoken word. someone who knows more about acoustics than i do could speak to this better.

Female: pennoda pulse enna?
A nerd to punk a nerd
Male: paarththene paarththene…
I'm bleeding, fucking A!
Female: stethoscope vaikkaamal...
That stuff is pink colored
Male: solvaenae solvaenae…
Some day I sell DNA

Male: sevvaazhai maynikkul
This boar ain't very cool
Female: ennaiyaa ennaiyaa?
You need a Hindi yew
Male: scanning naan seyyaamal
Got into Seattle
Female: sollaiyaa sollaiyaa
I'll lay a friend of yours
Male: naan paarththaal paavamaa?
I fought a barber man
Female: naal paarththu paarkka vaa...
We know what's in butter rum

this section reveals that in some cases where there are doubled words, the vowel quality does sound at least a little different, which i think is mostly due to the stress and pitch changes dictated by the melody. the English words are easy to miss, unless you know that this song is about medical students (in love. with dance troupes. in a field. it's a little pragmatically strained, no?)

Male: urgent aa operation seygindra case um undu
A jet pack operation...send him the crazy Hindu
Female: anbay dhaan naan seyyum operation case alla…
Whatever, my sadist, all baked and cooked alive
Male: Ellaikkul nil endraal en nenjam meerum indru
I lick you, belinda...the ninja made a movement
Female: Kannaalaa nam kaadhal Kargil war por alla
Tell Donna...no collar...i'll do what body loves
Male: tha tha tha thallaadhay… ilamai yerkaadhae…
I put papaya there...you love me inside there

the first time operation is said, it comes through clear as day. the second time is definitely trickier to hear, as it's a bit more condensed. i'm still a little confused about the phrase operation case, because it would rarely come up in English, unless you were talking about a medical malpractice lawsuit or something. i don't know what the common local name for the Kargil war is, so this might not be much of a codeswitch. Wikipedia is no help here, because all of the native articles on the topic are in character sets i don't have installed on my computer, and couldn't read if i did.

i mentioned before the [tʰ] --> [p] change. put papaya is the most salient instance of this.

Male: Kalluri vaanil kaayndha nilaavo?
My looney bun is fine, Benny Lava!
Female: Maanavar nenjil meyndha nilaavo?
Minor bun engine made Benny Lava!
Male: En madi meedhu saayndha nilaavo?
Anybody need this sign? Benny Lava!
Female: Unnidam vandhu vaayndha nilaavo?
You need a bun to bite Benny Lava!
Male: Haikuvae haikuvae…
Have you been high today?
Female: I love you endraayae…
I love you inside me

so there it is, the amazing behind the scenes story of Benny Lava. a couple more youtube links just to wrap it up. first, there is a video with an actual English translation of the Tamil, although it unfortunately doesn't match up with the music. second, there is a similar video which takes the same song and does transliterated lyrics in Portuguese, which actually appeared on the web over a year before the English one.

now, after all that analysis and repeated watching and listening, i'm off to do something else, singing to myself Tamil that i don't understand.

foreign grass

this past weekend i watched some of the NFL's first regular season game held overseas (yes, when i'm not actively being a linguist i'm frequently watching sports). the game was at the new Wembley Stadium in London. during the pregame, Fox's announcing crew was getting disproportionately excited about the whole event, as i'm sure their producers and the NFL instructed them to do. the strangest part of their reporting came when Tony Siragusa, the sideline reporter, gave an update on the playing conditions.

now i don't have an audio or video recording of exactly what it said, so i hope i'm not embellishing too much, but he said something along the lines of:

now this isn't a field, it's what they call a pitch...

something in the way he said it just made it sound like "see this rectangular expanse of grass? well this is no American grass. this is crazy British grass, which is so different that they have to call it something else." to be fair, he did go on and explain the difference in the types of grass seed used and the cut and drainage of the field—and these differences did play a factor, as the Giants and Dolphins churned up the ground into little more than mud during the course of the game. it was just the way that a simple lexical choice was preyed upon to create such drama, throwing arbitrariness of the sign out the window. i could imagine him standing next to the back end of a car in London reporting "now this car doesn't have a trunk, it's got what they call a boot! what will they think of next?"

in any event, it bugged me. i'm sure most American viewers barely noticed, and i'm not even sure if the game was broadcast in England. if it was, they were all probably watching Liverpool - Arsenal anyway.