Dawno, I do like the way your mind works. Any ideas for getting NPR to do more hamster news?

Could hamster power be an environmentally friendly answer to the impending energy crisis? How many hamsters running on wheels would it take to provide energy for a house or a factory?

Who seeks not for love?
Tawny cuteness overwhelms
Rats find no justice

You can listen to CBC digitally here.

I have no idea if they archive the show online, though I know they have a service where if you know when the interview was played you can order a tape -- I think it's $25/hr show though.

HELD TO RANSOM BY INVISIBLE HAMSTERS

the story was about the building of a large hotel in a wooded area of germany. since the site was the habitat of rare golden hamsters, the developers were obliged to do an environmental study before they could start construction. after a year, they hadn't found any golden hamsters at all so they declared that the hamsters had died out locally and concluded they could start work. however, environmentalists said that the golden hamsters were now SO rare in that area that no-one should be allowed to build a hotel there at all... so you can indeed say that the developers were held to ransom by invisible hamsters.

That HAD to be intentional. Three different misspellings in a single name could be nothing less. But I fail to get the point of it in this context.

Four!

And Johnny Morris! How could you deceive us all by overdubbing those colonial rodents with your charming BBC Welsh!

I haven't been so surprised since I discovered that Marine Boy wasn't just a cartoon done badly to save money (as I thought as a member of its viewership in the early 70s), that it was actually the groundbreaking first example of manga or anime to hit British television.

Which may explain why I have no time for manga and anime to this day. I actually heard someone pronounce the words "manga" and "anime" on some Channel 4 artsy-fartsy show the other day, and one of us should be really embarrassed, as his pronunciations were completely different from mine.

But you know what? No-one will ever know, since I can't imagine an occasion whre I might be called upon to pronounce either one.

Unlike the word "subtle", which I used to think was two different words with rather similar meanings, one of which I had never seen written, and the other I had never heard pronounced, which when you think about it is quite peculiar until...

oh-oh.

I had the same problem with the city of La Jolla, which I had read about and the city of La Hoya which I couldn't find on a map of California.

La Jolla, as it happens, is home to La Jolla Bioengineering Institute and La Jolla Cancer Research Foundation which Google tells me uses hamsters in their research.

Ah yes, the wheels. Backup power for your lap-top, mustn't lose any data. Right, Hammy?

Me too! I can't remember what the nuances were anymore, but it made perfect sense at the time. I think I realized my error in a flash of embarrassment when I was fifteen or so.

Also, I don't know what I was reading that I saw that word so much.

Mishap and awry gave me a lot of trouble, but not the same level.

Which leads me smoothly (or not at all smoothly) to: hamsters.

They're vicious things, especially the itsy-bitsy little Russian Dwarf ones. I had two that got into a fight -my cousin's fault- and one of them was, entirely literally, torn apart. It was not a good thing.

But I think hamster stories are big on the BBC for two reasons. Firstly, all stories about hamsters are just a little bit funnier than normal stories, and secondly, hamsters are the basic starter pet over here. There's a LOT of them.

And then we can get into the "You all," "All you all," and "You-ins," which, depending on my orneriness that day, I switch between.

I had to look that up to make sure you weren't joking.

If I keep discovering that I need to merge words like this, does that mean that my vocabulary is getting smaller?

A friend (I swear!) argued vociferously with a teacher that ANKS-it-y and ang-ZIGH-it-y were two different words. I myself pronounced 'shrapnel' with the accent on the second syllable; another friend, consoling me in my embarrassment for that, said he knew a word in his youth which he pronounced sha-PELL (it's a place you go to pray).

Our battles had mealy rounds.

Also ee-pit-o-mee and epitome.

I am to this day uncertain as to how to pronounce "forte", as in "That's not my forte". The perils of a written vocabulary.

The nice thing about English is that if you're worried about the size of your vocabulary, you can just make up more. Some sandwich place used the word "splodgilicious" in a TV ad last night, which I think is a perfectly cromulent word.

abi:
"Darn it! My character died in that mealy!"
"Yes, he's had his chips."

ajay #49: I never knew that! Cool! Now I can use that explanation. It's also very cool that 'foible' and 'forte' both refer to parts of a sword...that has all sort of metephorical possibilities. The pen is mightier than the foible, but weaker than the forte. And like that.

'Pufflubby' is wonderfully evocative. I may steal that one. I love puffy things (I'm thinking comforters and pilli, not my bottom eyelids, which are not at all pufflubby).

'Pilli' is our deliberately-being-funny family word for 'pillows'.

Join the crowd. There was a long-running family joke about me as a "mel-ANG-koly baby".

"Misled" got me too, except I pronounced it "my-zuld."

And don't get me started about Superman's home planet "Cripe-ton."

This is because an ex-boyfriend and I had a running joke about "bears go grrr," which mutated into types of bears--cold bears go brrr, mechanical bears go whirr, etc etc. This spread throughout our circle of friends, leading to saying things like "I'm a sleepy bear" instead of "I'm sleepy", to the point where my current boyfriend and I now say we're bears, with no qualifying adjective. But we narrowed it down to only two meanings, likely because we're unlikely to need to say we're suddenly mechanical.

Syrian hamsters (the default hamster) are strictly solitary. The only animal they automatically recognize as an enemy is another Syrian hamster. If you mistakenly put more than one adult in a cage, they'll fight, and you're likely to lose at least one of them. But if you keep them one to a cage, socialize them when they're young, and treat them well, they'll be peaceable and mild.

Is it just comics fans who know that the 'on' of Krypton should be pronounced as in 'electron', and not 'Scranton'?

maybe. but it's comic fans who decided there's an invisible "e" in front of "xavier." (me & my siblings pronounced it correctly, probably because someone decided to ask our parents. this was before the cartoon & movies.)

speaking of pronounciations from comics: there was a miniseries, i'm wanting to say it was by peter david (too close to shabbat to google), called "nth man." it was probably pronounced enth man, as in maths, but my father would tease us by referring to it as "nith man."

i learned to read out of comic books. i remember stumbling over the conventional depiction of stuttering: planet terry said, "b-but, d-dad!" & in my head he went "bee butt, dee dad."

When I was very young, I somehow got the impression that the Clone Wars in the backstory of the Star Wars universe were in some way related to the cold war. I came to the conclusion that Obi-Wan Kenobi was supposed to have fought against Russia when they developed cloning technology following the end of the second world war, or something to that effect.

But I was unaware of this. I was growing up in the Midwest, where the 'r' is pronounced in all positions, and with a sound like a little kid imitating a racecar ("rrr-RRR-rrr!"). I therefore imagined Clark Kent, above, saying "Rrr, I have an appointment"! This wasn't too embarrassing, except that it crept into my own speech when mocking my (or someone else's) unwillingnes to admit to something or other!

Huh? Could you spell that one out phonetically, miriam?

I'm more annoyed with the movies's mispronunciation of the family name of the Last Son of Scranton's archnemesis. I mean, why do they keep saying 'Luther' instead of 'LuTHOR'?

Even then, it seems like the idea is to interchange "er" and "uh" endings. Thus, people refer to my friend Noah as "No-er." Once I overheard someone in a locker room talking about selling "lobstahs" in the "pahking laht" of the local "Mahket Basket" in "Bill Ricker"
(The latter, of course, is the MA bedroom community of Billerica. You don't want to see the looks on people's faces if you decide that "Billerica" is a 4 syllable name. "Bill Ricka" is apparently acceptable.)

-Xopher /zo'fr/ ("ZOE-fur")

Sorry, you're still eksofer inside my head. But I'll note that for any sonnets in the future.

And there's the rub. Different dialects use different automatic consonants, and don't understand why other people think they're putting in anything that should be recognized as phonemic. So to me, 'Cuba and Africa' is pronounced with a glottal stop between the two first words; to John F. Kennedy, there was an automatic 'r' in the same position instead. This sounds to me like he's saying "Cubarand Africa," but he isn't.

The New York dialect group is quite distinct from the New England dialect group; in fact, my Chicago Midwestern twang is considered part of the New England dialect group, and we have a VERY strong /r/ after vowels! The US has only a few major dialect groups, but "New York Dialects" is a group by itself...roughly equal in number of dialects and in distinctiveness from other groups, but tiny geographically. This has a LOT to do with the fact that the New York area was and is the main first step on American soil for immigrants.

While both NE and NY dialects don't pronounce 'r' after a vowel (or rather realize its presence as lengthening of the vowel), the vowel modification is different. I would transcribe a typical NY pronunciation of 'park' as /po:k/ (same vowel as 'lock', but lengthened), but the Boston (for example) one is not only lengthened but fronted, so I'd be tempted to transcribe it as /pæ:k/ (in other words, identical to the pronunciation of 'pack' except for the prolongation of the vowel; possibly even more fronted).

Btw, I erred in transcribing my own damn name above! "Long o" (as in 'boat') is a combination of "short o" (as in 'caught') and a glide; my transcription should read /zow'fr/. Apologies for any inconvenience! :-)

It would be like deciding I was Abig*.

(Irony: this is probably the only place online that I am not known by my usual pseudonym, evilrooster. I don't know why I didn't start posting here under that name, but I didn't.)

---------
* A big what?, they cry.

...and that would be where? Not Apokolips, I hope.

I'm yet another East Coaster who's always read "Er" as, well, "er"..."Ur"..."rrrrrrrr". Born and bred within 20 miles of Grand Central Terminal, but I've often and often been told that I don't sound like a New Yorker at all. Since my mother was from eastern Washington state via Chicago, and my father from the western side of the Adirondacks via Philadelphia, and I became addicted to Britlit at an early age, it's true that I don't speak Noo Yawk well at all.

And I'm another lifelong bookworm who learned words by reading them and guessing at the pronunciation, often amusingly far from the mark.

I blush to confess that I rarely read (both "reed" and "red") comics, so I'm pretty sure that I picked up my "er" from suspect British literary conversational models l/i/k/e/such as DLS's Lord Peter Wimsey.

And when googling for enlightenment just now, I found a link to a Neil Gaiman journal entry where he complains that after a long trip, his family has given up trying to hold conversations with him

due to the way that I seem very pleased to have successfully said "Umm...." and sometimes "Er... is there any tea?" and such and then trail off into bemused and jet-lagged and tour-lagged silence.

http://www.neilgaiman.com/journal/2006/10/um-er-um-tea.html

And somehow it doesn't seem likely that Gaiman would title an entry "Um-er-um-tea" if he was actually pronouncing it "Um-uh-um-tea".

So I do wonder if there may be another legitimate version of "er", coming from another dialect, separate from but related to the "uh/er" usage in the comics. But I don't know how to search it out. And, of course, I could be completely mizzled.

And somehow it doesn't seem likely that Gaiman would title an entry "Um-er-um-tea" if he was actually pronouncing it "Um-uh-um-tea".

Although their "er" and "uh" sounds are very different to people with an English accent (south of England, I mean, though wider than Received Pronunciation), I can't hear the difference most of the time.

Reading this back, I realise I haven't really helped. But at least you can try out the different sounds to try and find the subtle differences.

* Occasionally my vowels lengthen, a legacy from eight years of childhood in Scunthorpe, but that's only for words like bath or grass. Also I lisp and stammer when tired or stressed, and listeners can't quite decide if I speak with a Thanet** accent, or am trying to do something close to RP (The Queens English).

** Pronounced Fannit

My friend from West Sussex pronounced "ion" and "iron" indistinguishably. I would spell both of them "eyeuhn" (I'm from California.)

I once had drinks with a group that included a Londoner, a Geordie (ie, from Newcastle), a lowland Scot (West Lothian), and an Aberdonian. I ran them through the first sentence of the Gettysburg Address, and not a one of us pronounced the letter "r" the same way.

I find that I can understand most native English speakers, except for some people from the Caribbean, especially some Jamaicans and Guyanese, who seem to speak our equivalent of Swiss-German. Well, some really heavy Highland accents can be hard too, but I usually manage to figure them out.

I really wonder how foreigners cope with the variations of English. I have had several Germans tell me that they struggle with heavy southern and urban African-American accents. They usually confess to feeling guilty about the latter.

And then there's the French "uvular r", and the two different Spanish "r" sounds...

Larry Brennan said (#90):
I really wonder how foreigners cope with the variations of English. I have had several Germans tell me that they struggle with heavy southern and urban African-American accents. They usually confess to feeling guilty about the latter.

I remember two friends in grad school, one from Turkey and the other from Lebanon, telling me about going to a party (within a few months of their arrival in the US) where a visiting Scottish grad student with a strong Glaswegian accent showed up. Neither could understand a word he said.

So, that's what it is that I do with my tongue. Sounds naughty.

[*] Which sounds you ought to need surgery if you're successful.

I guess that wouldn't bother some people. But I was absolutely horrified at the possibility.

#108: German 'Bach' is not uvular. It's velar, which is sometimes confused. I'm pretty sure 'loch' doesn't have a uvular sound in it either, but less sure than I am about the German.

In German, sometimes the 'r' is uvular, but never the 'ch'. How to tell: if prolonging the sound doesn't make you sound like you're gargling, it's not uvular.

And I meant my vowels shorten when my accent moves north. (Dahn Sarth - Baarth; Oop North - Baff).

(After bouncing around between various different Wikipedia pages on "voiceless velar fricative," "voiceless uvular fricative," etc., etc.:)
The final consonant of "loch" is supposed to be the same as the German consonant, and in fact both are given as examples of the "voiceless velar fricative." Confusingly, the German word "zach" is also given as an example of the "voiceless uvular fricative," which is what misled me. Fortunately, the "uvular consonant" page comes to the rescue:

The voiceless uvular fricative [χ] is similar to the voiceless velar fricative [x], except that it is articulated on the uvula. It is found instead of [x] in some dialects of German and Arabic.

So you can still speak Scottish and Welsh and (most dialects of) German if you get your uvula removed. (I'm trying to imagine some scenario where the spy is unmasked as an imposter because he had his uvula removed and can't quite get the local accent right...)

Diatryma (#110): it sounds [ha!] like the "forward hissy sound" you're referring to would be a different consonant.[*] You'd use it for German words where the neighboring vowel was a forward sound like "e" or "i" (as in "ich") but not when it's a back vowel like "a" (as in "Bach").

[*] Wikipedia says it's the "voiceless palatal fricative," for those who are dying to know. I would image that it's much harder to get your palate pierced than your uvula, but at this point I'm not sure I want to bet against someone trying it.

We always pronounced it "glawdia"; the "c" was likely to produce too explosive a sound. "g" was sufficiently gutteral that a hundred or so wouldn't cause something really unusual.

German: zach, 'timid'.

But I'll admit that my German dictionary doesn't list it, and neither do a couple of online dictionaries I just looked at. Google searches restricted to German-language pages seem to just turn up names (either the American first name "Zach" or the German last name "Zach"), so now I'm kind of dubious. Maybe it's an obscure dialectical word, or maybe it's nonsense.

Maybe I'll remember to ask around at work tomorrow...